Kathleen ZenithWhen September rolls around and the university hacks off its semesterly pound of flesh, experienced students know that tuition isn’t all they need to pay for.
From textbooks and iClickers (may they burn in hell), to lab equipment and printer ink, being a student costs money. Fair enough, we all know what we signed up for; bullshit costs or otherwise. But for my $500 (or so) per class, I get full credit, right?
Not quite, as many classes are structured to squeeze every last dollar out of their students. Math 104, for example: I paid $500ish for the course, and $180 or so for a Stewart Calculus tome. (In retrospect, I should have bought used, but that’s beside the point).
But therein lies my problem. You see, on the first day of class, I was informed that to get 10 per cent of my course credit, I needed to pay for a WebAssign code. Fair enough, as the cost of the code was included with my book. When I went to resell the book, however, I got a little more than 50 cents on the dollar, as Webassign on its own costs in the neighbourhood of $75 from the bookstore.
Combine this with my used textbook, and I walked away having lost more than $100. This still isn’t the part that stings, though. What really bites is that when I pay my tuition, I expect to show up to class already having paid for access to all of my marks. These additional fees make students responsible for paying more for a service that firstly increases marks negligibly if at all, and second sucks even more money out of their pockets.
Used especially regularly in 100-level basic requirement courses, this devious system takes advantage of students who, for the most part, don’t know any better. They blindly shell out, often not knowing that there might be a more efficient way to go about their academic life.
If the university wants me to shell out that kind of dough for a more complete course, use my $70 to hire another TA or two and give me paper assignments marked by a real person. God knows being a grad student is a shitty enough deal as is; there’s no need to give their jobs to a site that gets pissed off when you don’t use the right notation.
When I go on Beartracks in the future, I wish to see the fee I must pay for access to 100 per cent of my coursemark. It’s just not right to ask students to pay 10% more after they’ve built their schedules and need credit. Though it might be called “streamlining” by some, let us vow to hereby refer to it by its proper name: “cash grab.”
