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<p>So you discount any responsibility of the student? There are plenty of bad teachers and sketchily-designed courses out there, but there are also a lot of bad and immature students, particularly in the freshman- and sophomore-level classes that people usually label as weed-out classes.</p>
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<p>I agree that, individually, adjuncts are not necessarily bad, but on the average, they tend to provide inferior instruction based on a variety of studies. This says more about how they are treated than their own capabilities, as there are a lot of bright and talented adjuncts that are simply overworked and marginalized. So, while you might find one adjunct to be great, the overall number is still usually indicative of poorer instruction. This is a much bigger problem in the arts and sciences where there is less money floating around rather than engineering, but those are exactly the kinds of people teaching some of those early classes.</p>
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<p>In an ideal world, that would be great, but even the ones who make up problems generally cycle through them again eventually. It is quite difficult to craft an effective problem set, and doing a new one every time you teach the class eventually gets quite taxing as you start running out of different ways to effectively ask the same question. At that point a lot of professors trying that approach just cycle back through, sometimes changing numbers. That only slightly helps the problem though, since if they start doing that, chances are someone still has the old questions somewhere and can get them distributed.</p>
<p>I can honestly say I have never come across a professor who uses as completely new set of problems each time he or she teaches a course year after year. It would just be too much. Ultimately there isn’t a foolproof solution short of brand new questions ad infinitum, so you either have to just make homework not worth very much or else put everyone on equal footing to make it fair.</p>