A friend writes to me:
You will be amused to know that students in our Bayesian Inference paper at 4th year found solutions to exercises from your book on-line. The amazing thing was that some of them were dumb enough to copy out solutions verbatim. However, I thought you might like to know you have done well in this class!
I’m happy to hear this. I worked hard on those solutions!
Some purposefully put typo’s and mechanical errors in solutions to help catch students being so dumb.
I ran into the opposite – as a marker I had access to a solutions manual but also was in a course that assigned one of the questions that was in there.
My strategy – answer the question first without looking at the solution in the manual.
Wait one day – then read the solutions manual and re-answer.
Wait one more day and then re-answer the question a critically as I could.
So three times the effort – and the lowest mark I recieved in that course.
Lesson – sample size 1!