Student Use Of Textbook Solution Manuals: Student And Faculty Perspectives In A Large Mechanical Engineering Department
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anecdotal evidence indicates that Mechanical Engineering students have unprecedented access to textbook solutions manuals, and possibly a large percentage of students regularly refer to these manuals when working graded homework assignments. Many faculty voice concerns regarding the ethics of this behavior and its affect on student learning; however, the prevalence of the solutions manual usage and its effects on learning are not well documented. To better understand how students use solutions manuals, a survey was submitted to undergraduate students and faculty of the Mechanical Engineering Department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, as part of a larger study on the effects of solution manual access on student learning. The methodology emulates earlier studies at M.I.T. 1 and Georgia Tech 2 that addressed student perceptions of cheating. This survey was administered in a number of required courses, with multiple sections that are typically offered every quarter at Cal Poly. The goal of this survey was to determine the incidence rate of solution manual use and student perceptions on the ethics and educational value of using the solution manuals when working homework assignments. Faculty perceptions were also tabulated using a similar survey. Quantitative results are presented along with an assessment of interactions between student perceptions and their use of the solution manuals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it