Questioning course readers
By Crystal Hsing
March 4, 2011 6:41 a.m.
Amid rising educational costs, some students are calling into question the price tag on course readers.
“I feel like I’m being robbed,” said Erik Batres, a third-year philosophy student with an accounting minor. “I don’t think teachers have students’ best interests in mind when they charge $30 for a course reader, and the same information is online.”
Jim Darcey, owner of Copymat in Westwood, said the prices of course readers vary greatly depending on how much is paid in fees to publishers.
For every copyrighted article that is reprinted in a course reader, a permission fee, which differs from publisher to publisher, must be paid for the right to distribute the material, Darcey said.
These permission fees make up the bulk of the cost of a course reader, and the selling price also includes the cost of printing and binding, Darcey said.
Associated Students UCLA faces similar productions costs for the course readers it distributes, said Neil Yamaguchi, ASUCLA academic support director.
“We do have an overhead in terms of labor to produce everything and maintenance of the machines, and (we do) make a profit,” Yamaguchi said. “But all that money does go back to supporting our organization and the student union.”
Since each reader is only offered by one seller, students have no choice but to pay the asking price if they need a course reader, Batres said.
During his freshman year, Batres took a Fiat Lux seminar in sociology that required a $30 course reader. Not wanting to pay for the reader, he eventually found six of the eight articles in the reader online.
Charmaine Grismore, a third-year sociology student, said she also avoids buying course readers because of their high cost. Instead, she opts to borrow readers from her friends or searches for required material online.
“I don’t see why I should spend money on something I can get in some other way,” Grismore said.
For course readers that contain the professor’s own material, such as notes on lecture material or practice problems, professors could easily make the notes available to students for free online, Batres said.
Steven Hardinger, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, assigns a course reader and a lecture supplement as requirements for his Chemistry 14C course.
His course reader, called a Thinkbook, provides students with extra notes on the material that he has accumulated over the past 10 years as well as practice problems, while the lecture supplement contains printouts of lecture PowerPoint presentations.
Though Hardinger used to offer all this material online, he started using a reader after surveying one of his classes. He found the majority of students said they would be willing to pay for the convenience of having all the material bound into one book.
“I don’t think I’ve had any student in the past five years say they didn’t like it and that they’d rather have it online,” Hardinger said.
The Thinkbook and lecture supplement cost $40 and $42.75, respectively, at the UCLA textbook store. Many students opt to buy them rather than the $200 textbook because they are more useful, said Kimmie Wong, a fourth-year integrative biology and physiology student.
“I liked the Thinkbook a lot because it gave us a really good idea of the types of questions the professor would ask on exams,” Wong said. “For the most part, the textbook wasn’t that helpful, so I didn’t buy it.”
Professors may also choose not to put material online to prevent any unauthorized distribution of their work, said Christian Roberts, professor of integrative biology and physiology.
Roberts said he prints the course reader for his physiological science class on purple paper so that photocopies cannot be made.
“The material is all my own research,” he said. “I don’t want people copying or scanning it, because next thing you know, it’s being posted and sent around online.”
However, professors whose course readers contain their own material face an issue of conflict of interest since they may be receiving royalties from the sale of the reader, said Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy.
Hardinger said he does receive a royalty for the sale of his Thinkbook and lecture supplement, but that the amount is not large.
“I don’t see any reason why the people who write the articles we read in our course readers and the publishers shouldn’t get paid for their work,” Kleiman said. “I just don’t think it’s right if I’m assigning it personally.”
If a course reader for a class includes any material he has published, Kleiman tells his publisher to waive the royalties he is entitled to. This quarter, Kleiman assigned a book he authored as a textbook for his public policy class. Since he receives a royalty of $1 for every book sold, he offered each of his students a $1 reimbursement if they purchased his book for the class.
“One of the things I teach in my classes is the idea of conflict of interest, and this seems like a very straightforward case to me,” he said.
