Expensive textbooks should at least be high quality, correct

I purchased “Understanding Statistics in the Behavioral Sciences” by Robert R. Pagano for a psychology statistics class this semester. I was surprised when the price tag read nearly $165 because it was a small book with no interesting pictures and boring black and blue print. When I got the book home and inspected it closer, I noticed a whole chapter near the back of the book was bound upside down!

I thought that was really weird and unprofessional, but I couldn’t do anything about it since I needed the book for class assignments. As the semester wore on, I began reading the chapters and noticed grammatical errors, a few missing words like “that,” “an,” and “are.” I seriously thought people actually proofread these kinds of books, since they are intended for students to learn from!

The last straw for me was the incorrect answers to practice problems in the “Answers” section of the book. How are students supposed to learn if they keep getting the correct answer but are confused because the book answers say something totally different?

Isn’t a student supposed to be able to trust what comes from a book that was supposedly written by a professor who graduated from Yale University? I think so.

The publisher, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, should be ashamed of not only ripping off us poor college students, but also for producing a low-quality textbook and making me sit at Barnes & Noble for three hours working on the same problem because I thought I wasn’t doing it right.

Sandra Holt

psychology junior