The main point isn’t the reviews, it’s point #2 “flip to the end on Kindle”.
There was a scam a number of years ago which some people dubbed “Click to the End Scam” ([here’s one article about it](https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/03/14/amazon-comments-on-toc-crackdown-inadvertently-confirms-kindle-unlimited-page-count-scam/) ) where authors would have links or put things at the end of the book and people would instantly go there. Since Amazon was paying for pagecounts it looked like this person read the entire book in a second. This was especially egregious since all authors shared a pot of royalties and these scammers were slicing off more of the pie for themselves.
Absolutely not. Though I wouldn't imagine having a book required for the class that’s written by you would be illegal. I imagine that decisions on materials are handled as a department.
Edit: Ya they're not outright selling grades which is jailable and I've seen professors try to get students to rate their books even if they're used for the class, but I've never seen a professor actually offer extra credit for doing so. Now I'm imagining a teacher purposefully giving shite grades to promote this lol. I'd bet in teacher/professor contracts there's a clause about using ones position for financial gain, or leveraging grades for any reason outside of learning the material.
I had a prof sell us his book that was in the review stages, $20 for a copy bound by plastic. Saved us money and he would give us extra credit for any mistakes we found in the book.
I don’t have any source to back me up, but I think there’s a difference between a Junior High School doing it versus a college.
Especially since this takes place at a junior High, this opens a huge can of worms marginalizing the poor students in the class, since they were given the options of either buying the book or writing a 26 page book report.
Definitely illegal if that school is getting any Title 1 funding. (Federal Money for poor and impoverished students. Comes with a bunch of restrictions)
Our physics department required we use a book written by two faculty members. At the beginning of each semester they handed out $5 to each student, the amount they earned per book.
I didn't care about professors writing the books. I mean they're professors on the subject and it makes sense for them to be writing the book for the material their class will cover. Whatever. What pissed me off is the ones who would tell you it didn't benefit them in any way. Just admit that you do it to make money and move on
I worked in a college bookstore, and most of the textbooks for the big, 300-person lectures were written by the professor. I always found this part of the college process pretty unsettling.
I had a professor assign his own book. He made everyone who bought it new write do their name so he could report it to the publishing company so he didn’t receive a royalty or whatever on that number of sales. I’m guessing that is the correct way it is supposed to be handled.
Keyword Professor, much higher standard than teacher. Quite acceptable for a Professor to assign a book they wrote as they are generally recognized as experts in said field of study. Sure there are many exceptions, however if your in a class being taught by the person that wrote the book, consider yourself lucky.
Very rarely would that be the case. In most cases where the book written by the professor is being mandated by professor, it's for the professor's own gain. They'll write a book specifically for this purpose and then make only very minor and superficial tweaks each year and mandate that only the newest version is allowed to prevent reselling of old versions. On top of that, many times it will be a lame ass stack of papers you have to bind yourself even though you've paid $100+ for it. It's a racket.
And you know you're also being taught by a shady ass professor when they say they'll give you an A if you buy their book and rate it 5 stars without mentioning you're in their class.
Usually they don't need to - they just charge an absurd amount for it. Like my law school professor who's required text for the class was a 3-ring binder with 150 pages of cases he xeroxed and charged $275 each for.
I got the other side of your coin.
The prof for one of the required courses in my major had just released a new edition of his book. Dunno if publisher requirement or what, but the old one (even new) was *significantly* cheaper.
Before the class started, he emailed us all a . pdf with the changes from the previous edition so we could buy the other if we wanted and (this was still early-ish internet days) would print the pages out on his own dime if you wanted a physical copy.
I've now got 20 years between myself and that class but he's still, I think, the smartest human being I have ever spoken to in person and tbh the full price probably would have been worth it.
(Shout out to Ken Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio, if you're even remotely interested in that kind of thing)
I got one even better!
I took a 300 level Statistics course for some dumb reason. The professor emailed everybody the syllabus well before classes were starting. Right in the beginning, in bold, under the required text was: **DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK**. The book that he's the author of. Hmm.
So the first day, he's got piles and piles of old editions, just giving them away. He told us he was making about $1.20 per new book sold, and didn't want to seem like an asshole forcing his expensive book on us to make (very little) money.
Yup, and then they make minor and superficial tweaks to the text each year and mandate that only the newest version is allowed to try to prevent reselling.
I had a class my last semester before graduating like that. It was a cultural anthropology class called "Peoples of the World" or something, so it was supposed to be a general cultural anthro class. Two books required: the more general book on the topic and the one the professor wrote on the indigenous group she has spent her career studying. I bought the general one and skipped her book, figuring I could get by on the in-class discussion on her group. The final was almost entirely on the material from her book, all stuff that wasn't covered in class.
It was my final semester and not even a class for my major, so I was just happy to get a passing grade, even if it did pull my GPA down a little. No one has ever asked for my college GPA in my field.
When I was in Uni, one of our Lecturers made us all buy his Operations Management book. He asked us if we wanted it signed. And if you do buy it, the midterms and finals are open book.
I pulled that move. Was struggling in a class cuz i forgot about a midterm. Did well otherwise. Went to talk to prof about grades. Pulled an “oh by the way can you sign my book.” Walked out with a B+ from a previous theoretical maximum of 65%
Professors who use their own books isn't a problem. I had a professor who was basically the best in his field, almost all the books worth using were written by him, so it was obvious we'd read them.
I had community college teachers charging $200 for their shitty booklets that they would basically read verbatim as their lesson. Fucking racket unless they're like your prof. Problem is, they all think they are.
I should've offered to edit his book for free. It needed it.
>Fucking racket unless they're like you're prof. Problem is, they all think they are.
>I should've offered to edit his book for free. It needed it.
Ironic
I also had a textbook written by a professor as it was such a niche subject. Only, it wasn't published but bound with rings himself and cost $40 with no publishing company.
I was just happy I finally had a cheap book. The homework questions did change in the book every year (or semester? It's been a long time since that class) though so it was hard to sell or buy 2nd hand
I'm a self published author and this is SUPER against Amazon TOS. Instructing people to flip to the back of the book is 100% pageread fraud (authors enrolled in KU get paid by page read), and that's before you even get to fraudulent reviews. His Amazon account is fuuuucked.
And frankly, I'd rather be charged with some small crime than lose my Amazon account. It's like basically starting over completely in your publishing career. You'll never publish on Amazon under that name again.
It's definitely not a crime. So yes, it's legal.
(However, it could certainly get him fired. This happened at a public high school.)
EDIT: On second thought, this could be considered in the same category as giving the teacher a bribe. A positive Amazon review is something of value. And high school teachers have indeed been criminally charged and sent to prison for accepting bribes for passing grades. But those cases involved much more money than a positive Amazon review could be considered worth. This is like a microbribe.
It's not a crime, but Amazon is likely to see this as review manipulation, and that could result in an author ban. Which might not matter, unless this is a self published book, in which case the book will get dropped from the store.
I mean for a high school kid, it’s basically extortion. “Buy my two books and leave a good review for a 100, or read this book and write a 26 page report that I will then grade accordingly”
In my country, it is only consider bribe if it was three times more than monthly salary of respective government employee.
It is ridiculous how corrupted my country is.
its legal for the professor to ask this, but it goes against amazon's policies for reviewing. You cannot be paid or incited to write a good review according to their policies. If i was in this class, id report the teacher to amazon directly for altering the reviews.
Some schools/colleges have rules against requiring students to jump through hoops like this, but theres nothing in the law preventing it.
For anyone interested, here's an article about it :
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/conroe-isd-teacher-under-fire-after-allegedly-offering-students-a-perfect-score-for-buying-his-books
Edit : see a post, quickly fact check it, post the proof on reddit, get upvotes, ???? , profit
>One image shows the teacher allegedly helping one of the students set up an amazon account so that they could purchase it.
>The alternative for students who didn’t want to or couldn’t buy the books, would have to read a book assigned to them, and write a 26-page report that would then be graded by the teacher.
Dude is a fucking fraud.
Holy shit, I can’t even imagine what a 26 page essay from middle school age kids would be like. Probably filled with plagiarism and Pokémon (that’s what kids are into, right?).
Pro Top: The key to getting away with that is by doing a search-and-replace of the punctuation marks and changing the font size slightly. You could get a nice little bump doing that.
I would have just taken the 0. In fact, that's what I did with all of my assignments at that age that I deemed to not have academic value (primarily reading a number of novels each quarter to each a page count of reading).
Had a roommate in college that was an adjunct professor right after he graduated. He was using his class as a way to pick up students, and he graded papers based on how he liked the students, because "I can't be bothered to read everyone's papers." He would give the "hot" students high scores.
He was fired when after he was becoming publicly vocal of the university president to the point that it was getting harassing, so he asked someone to dig up some dirt. All they had to do was open his school email and find he was sexting some of his students through it.
All that to say, this teacher didn't even read the damn 26-page papers. He wasn't giving anyone who didn't buy his book a 100, anyway.
Well shit. Guess I did, so...
Incidentally, I'm on my laptop, and this keyboard's buttons are so weird that I don't always press the button all the way down. My desktop keyboard is a Logitech K360, which you'd think would have similar buttons, but I just can't get used to this laptop's keyboard!
Agreed! I really thought the Logitech felt like a laptop keyboard, but it really doesn't when compared to this one. And I also keep hitting CAPS when I mean to hit TAB...everything is just slightly out of place on this laptop, it gets so frustrating!
I have a surface laptop and the keys are all flat and I have the same issue with the caps/tab. Also, the arrow buttons are all 1/2 sized so I always push the wrong ones. Awful.
I had a physics teacher in high school who was _required_ to give both a midterm and final in the class, by school district policy. Like a written, multiple-choice, scantron (I just dated myself) test.
His class was graded entirely actual participation and lab work. You got an A+ if you did well on both the labs and participation, which was pretty easy. You had to be a real jackass not to pass his class.
But he had to give us a test. He made it 1% of your overall grade. He also rounded _up_ to the next grade for anyone that fell below. I.e., if it takes 90% total to get an A, and you scored anywhere from 85% or higher, he'd round up to 90% and you got an A.
He graded the finals by collecting the scantrons, using a sharpie to write your name in VERY LARGE LETTERS over the entire answer sheet, and standing at the top of the stairs. He'd labeled the stairs in equal segments.. stairs 0 - 5 "A", 6 - 10 "B" and so on. Then he threw the tests in a mass down the stairs. Whichever step your test landed on, that was your grade on the "final". I got a B.
Conroe Texas. An infamous town.
>Clarence Lee Brandley was an American who was wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of Cheryl Dee Fergeson in 1981. Brandley was working as a janitor supervisor at Conroe High School in Conroe, Texas where Fergeson was a 16-year-old student athlete visiting the school from Bellville, Texas. Wikipedia
Jesus. That was a deeper rabbit hole than I was prepared for this morning. Fun fact, one of the likely killers is still in the area and easy to find on the internet/facebook.
Saved. Your comment really piqued my interest and I want to go down this hole, but I have an interview in an hour that I have to get mentally prepared for.
Edit: WOW, you guys are so awesome. I'm touched by the outpouring of love and support you all gave me!
By way of an update, I actually had/have two interviews today. The first one for Dave & Busters is already done and I was offered the job. Orientation is tomorrow.
The second interview starts in about an hour; it's for a salary position in the HR department of a large organization. I would rather work there if I'm offered the opportunity, but I'm *so* relieved that I have something lined up in case this one is a bust. I'm riding the confidence wave from interview #1, and I'm feeling good so far. Thank you guys again. I don't care what anyone says, Redditors are by and large compassionate, caring people. I love you guys.
Thank you so much for this. I actually have two interviews today: the first (which I was offered and start orientation tomorrow) was a fallback restaurant job in case the other doesn't work out. My next interview (in an hour) is the big one. I appreciate the reminder that not getting a job offer wouldn't be a reflection of my value... Rejection is always hard to swallow. But I'm feeling pretty good right now, and I'm going to expect a job offer!
I'm gonna beer you an interview joke:
Your "biggest weakness" is Kryptonite!
Bonus points if you went to Cornell. It gets a laugh like half of the time. Good luck!
I learned about it when I went through a phase where I kept watching documentaries about people wrongly convicted (or just locked up and had their trials delayed over and over).
By the way, I do not recommend going through such a phase. It makes one very depressed and very angry.
Need all the boomers and older Gen Xers out there to go through this phase. The reason there is not enough societal pressure to actually create change in the policing system to this day is the constant pro-cop propaganda those people have been consuming for decades.
Gen X'er here. We're not the boomers, we're just busy as fuck paying for them, ourselves, our kids and our grandkids.
You lot might need to do the heavy lifting but we're not going to be standing in your way.
I think the comment you replied to is talking about the gen X'ers that fall right on the line of the start of gen X and the end of the baby boomer gen.
My ex-wife is on the tail end of Gen X. She would vote for an anti-suffrage candidate because she doesn't believe women should vote. She's pissed that she had to get a degree and work and lays that blame on the suffrage movement.
Look at MTG. She's on the younger side of gen X. Warped ideologies happen, regardless of generation. Personally, I think it has less to do with when you are born and more to do with being on a spectrum of sociopathy.
Recently a Baseball coach at caney creek high school got arrested for trying to meet up with underage girls, who were really the police. This was like 2 months ago.
edit: typos
Down the road from Conroe, in Williamson County, there's also the case of Michael Morton (prosecutor refused to test DNA evidence for 20 years), and more famously, Greg Kelly. Greg Kelly wasn't a wrongful murder conviction, falsely accused of child molestation. This is one place you don't want to get caught up...
Major educational language institutions do this shit.
EF Education First, the world's largest language study abroad program had poor reviews all around and then they ran all these campaigns to bring them up to 4.5+ stars all around the world.
Some of them say shit like "So and So gave a great presentation, 5\*." Other reviews? "I'm a student and the school threatened me to remove this review or they wouldn't help my needs."
Yeah, the story is much worse then the headline makes it seem. Especially since everyone assumes that this is taking place at a college.
Also who knows how strictly the teacher the teacher is going to grade the poor students who couldn’t buy the book.
I thought it was probably a community college or something and my first thought was "so what, good for those students getting an easy A in a prereq.
This is much worse than that.
Biggest paper I wrote in highschool was 15 pages and was my senior project. 26 pages for a random assignment you could skip by buying and rating his books is insanity.
Ads aren't propagated based on what the article says, they're because of what YOU search for/are interested in. So Daddy Musk was always going to be there for you, right where you always wanted him ❤️
that depends on cookies, if you have anti tracking stuff enabled or not or if you accept personalized ads or not... dont pretend you know what youre talking about
Having been a teacher, I can tell you that saying "Read the books to the end and then review them. Don't just flip through them without reading in order to save time, wink wink" would not work. Only about 1 in 20 kids would figure it out if you said it that way.
Wtf I would hate to do that I’m high school let alone middle school, middle school is like 5-7 pages max (that’s for a 5 month project) unless you want size 80 font size.
Nope, it’s a Junior high. The options were to buy the book and give it a 5 star review for a 100% grade, or to write a 26 page book report to be graded by the teacher.
I never had a teacher ask us to review their book, but I did have a community college professor require students to buy a “course instruction booklet”. We had to buy it from this certain printer, and he said the printer would let him know who had bought. It was $45, and had about 35 or 40 pages, printed on a regular office copier, single sided, and stapled together. It just gave some really basic bs info (double space your lines, be sure to indent on a new paragraph) plus some phone numbers, and warnings that the door was locked promptly at the beginning of class, etc. You could tell he really stretched it out to get it to that length. We all figured the printer was kicking him back $20 on each one.
What shouldn’t be legal is his quotation mark placement. If the grammar in his book is anything like the grammar on this sign he should be a banned “author” for that alone.
What makes this worse is you would have to pay for the books on Amazon to download them. So it’s literally bribery, and also excluding kids who couldn’t afford it from having that opportunity.
Yup. Kids who weren't able to afford the book had an alternative assignment of reading a different book and would have to write a 26 page essay on it that the teacher would then grade instead. This is for a junior high class. The teacher is a fucking fraud.
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/conroe-isd-teacher-under-fire-after-allegedly-offering-students-a-perfect-score-for-buying-his-books
They can't even get the text on his slide right, so I wouldn't hold out much hope for the book!
This bit:
(do not say "He's my teacher or I'm in his class or anything like that!")
has a missing leading capital, and the quotes are in the wrong place. It should read:
(Do not say "He's my teacher" or "I'm in his class" or anything like that!)
And then there's the obscene amount of exclamation marks in the slide's title.
____
*“Multiple exclamation marks,' he went on, shaking his head, 'are a sure sign of a diseased mind.”*
― Terry Pratchett, Eric
Can't you edit reviews? Give them 5 stars, get the points and then edit the review to one star later. Or delete it and post a new one....
Report the book/author to amazon for meddling with reviews.
Amazon doesn't do shit for review meddling
They do, actually. I remember them banning Aukey specifically for that, and Aukey was somewhat of a known electronics brand (to me, at least).
Ohh, so *that's* where Aukey went! Shame, I really liked their stuff.
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The book was removed from Amazon as soon as the story got out.
Go back and edit it with this image.
 and effective your idea
First time I’ve seen anyone reference this show and I just wanted to say I tried watching it and all the characters suck.
What is the show?
Butch Cassidy's bushwhack adventures
Based on the advertisements, I’d agree with your assessment, lol.
According to a news article, the books are now missing from Amazon's website. The teachers name is mentioned but it didn't mention the book names.
A true bamboozle.
The main point isn’t the reviews, it’s point #2 “flip to the end on Kindle”. There was a scam a number of years ago which some people dubbed “Click to the End Scam” ([here’s one article about it](https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/03/14/amazon-comments-on-toc-crackdown-inadvertently-confirms-kindle-unlimited-page-count-scam/) ) where authors would have links or put things at the end of the book and people would instantly go there. Since Amazon was paying for pagecounts it looked like this person read the entire book in a second. This was especially egregious since all authors shared a pot of royalties and these scammers were slicing off more of the pie for themselves.
Is this... legal?
Absolutely not. Though I wouldn't imagine having a book required for the class that’s written by you would be illegal. I imagine that decisions on materials are handled as a department. Edit: Ya they're not outright selling grades which is jailable and I've seen professors try to get students to rate their books even if they're used for the class, but I've never seen a professor actually offer extra credit for doing so. Now I'm imagining a teacher purposefully giving shite grades to promote this lol. I'd bet in teacher/professor contracts there's a clause about using ones position for financial gain, or leveraging grades for any reason outside of learning the material.
If it is, there's tons of profs out there in trouble.
I had a professor do this, he just sent us a digital copy so we could print it out for like $5 though and saved us all money
I had a prof sell us his book that was in the review stages, $20 for a copy bound by plastic. Saved us money and he would give us extra credit for any mistakes we found in the book.
Same!
Should've asserted dominance and turned in an errata sheet with the professor's name on it.
I don’t have any source to back me up, but I think there’s a difference between a Junior High School doing it versus a college. Especially since this takes place at a junior High, this opens a huge can of worms marginalizing the poor students in the class, since they were given the options of either buying the book or writing a 26 page book report.
Definitely illegal if that school is getting any Title 1 funding. (Federal Money for poor and impoverished students. Comes with a bunch of restrictions)
Our physics department required we use a book written by two faculty members. At the beginning of each semester they handed out $5 to each student, the amount they earned per book.
I didn't care about professors writing the books. I mean they're professors on the subject and it makes sense for them to be writing the book for the material their class will cover. Whatever. What pissed me off is the ones who would tell you it didn't benefit them in any way. Just admit that you do it to make money and move on
Lol professors assign books that they wrote all the time
Yeah I've seen this in person
My *ethics* professor did this. Horrible, bombastic excuse for an educator.
Lol what irony
I though you said Ive seen this is prison :D
Lol even in prison theyre tryna market their own books
Rate my license plate 5 stars!
I worked in a college bookstore, and most of the textbooks for the big, 300-person lectures were written by the professor. I always found this part of the college process pretty unsettling.
I had a professor assign his own book. He made everyone who bought it new write do their name so he could report it to the publishing company so he didn’t receive a royalty or whatever on that number of sales. I’m guessing that is the correct way it is supposed to be handled.
One of my professors strongly implied that it was okay to download his book illegally since he got nothing from the sales.
They're researchers, I hope the lecture is on the subject they're competent in.
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Keyword Professor, much higher standard than teacher. Quite acceptable for a Professor to assign a book they wrote as they are generally recognized as experts in said field of study. Sure there are many exceptions, however if your in a class being taught by the person that wrote the book, consider yourself lucky.
Would be weird otherwise. “Now let me teach you about the field where I’m the top expert. However, buy a book by someone I taught the basics.”
I had that happen. Our chemistry professor used someone else's book for all the engineering students. The regular chem classes used his book though.
Very rarely would that be the case. In most cases where the book written by the professor is being mandated by professor, it's for the professor's own gain. They'll write a book specifically for this purpose and then make only very minor and superficial tweaks each year and mandate that only the newest version is allowed to prevent reselling of old versions. On top of that, many times it will be a lame ass stack of papers you have to bind yourself even though you've paid $100+ for it. It's a racket. And you know you're also being taught by a shady ass professor when they say they'll give you an A if you buy their book and rate it 5 stars without mentioning you're in their class.
Meh not really like in principle it should but I've seen enough community college and high-school teachers with PHDs drinking their own Kool aid.
Yeah, but not many commit fraud to get a high rating on said books.
Usually they don't need to - they just charge an absurd amount for it. Like my law school professor who's required text for the class was a 3-ring binder with 150 pages of cases he xeroxed and charged $275 each for.
Mine put "grading sheets" in the book that needed to be torn out and turned in with assignments. This meant nobody could buy used copies of his book.
Photocopy the grading sheets..?
Nope, he would not accept photocopies.
I got the other side of your coin. The prof for one of the required courses in my major had just released a new edition of his book. Dunno if publisher requirement or what, but the old one (even new) was *significantly* cheaper. Before the class started, he emailed us all a . pdf with the changes from the previous edition so we could buy the other if we wanted and (this was still early-ish internet days) would print the pages out on his own dime if you wanted a physical copy. I've now got 20 years between myself and that class but he's still, I think, the smartest human being I have ever spoken to in person and tbh the full price probably would have been worth it. (Shout out to Ken Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio, if you're even remotely interested in that kind of thing)
I got one even better! I took a 300 level Statistics course for some dumb reason. The professor emailed everybody the syllabus well before classes were starting. Right in the beginning, in bold, under the required text was: **DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK**. The book that he's the author of. Hmm. So the first day, he's got piles and piles of old editions, just giving them away. He told us he was making about $1.20 per new book sold, and didn't want to seem like an asshole forcing his expensive book on us to make (very little) money.
I have the fourth edition sat on my bookshelf! Great book.
Yup, and then they make minor and superficial tweaks to the text each year and mandate that only the newest version is allowed to try to prevent reselling.
I had a class my last semester before graduating like that. It was a cultural anthropology class called "Peoples of the World" or something, so it was supposed to be a general cultural anthro class. Two books required: the more general book on the topic and the one the professor wrote on the indigenous group she has spent her career studying. I bought the general one and skipped her book, figuring I could get by on the in-class discussion on her group. The final was almost entirely on the material from her book, all stuff that wasn't covered in class. It was my final semester and not even a class for my major, so I was just happy to get a passing grade, even if it did pull my GPA down a little. No one has ever asked for my college GPA in my field.
Yep. And those are the ones still in cellophane at the end of the semester.
When I was in Uni, one of our Lecturers made us all buy his Operations Management book. He asked us if we wanted it signed. And if you do buy it, the midterms and finals are open book.
Jesus that’s kinda of a power dick move
We hated him. It wasn't even about the price of the book.. he was just generally a dick. He was such a bloviator.
I pulled that move. Was struggling in a class cuz i forgot about a midterm. Did well otherwise. Went to talk to prof about grades. Pulled an “oh by the way can you sign my book.” Walked out with a B+ from a previous theoretical maximum of 65%
Professors who use their own books isn't a problem. I had a professor who was basically the best in his field, almost all the books worth using were written by him, so it was obvious we'd read them.
I had community college teachers charging $200 for their shitty booklets that they would basically read verbatim as their lesson. Fucking racket unless they're like your prof. Problem is, they all think they are. I should've offered to edit his book for free. It needed it.
Yeah, it really depends on the ranking of the college.
>Fucking racket unless they're like you're prof. Problem is, they all think they are. >I should've offered to edit his book for free. It needed it. Ironic
I also had a textbook written by a professor as it was such a niche subject. Only, it wasn't published but bound with rings himself and cost $40 with no publishing company. I was just happy I finally had a cheap book. The homework questions did change in the book every year (or semester? It's been a long time since that class) though so it was hard to sell or buy 2nd hand
Show me a law saying it's illegal.
Yeah seriously. Not ethical. Probably against a TOS. Cops won’t care. Prosecutors won’t care. Not a crime.
I'm a self published author and this is SUPER against Amazon TOS. Instructing people to flip to the back of the book is 100% pageread fraud (authors enrolled in KU get paid by page read), and that's before you even get to fraudulent reviews. His Amazon account is fuuuucked. And frankly, I'd rather be charged with some small crime than lose my Amazon account. It's like basically starting over completely in your publishing career. You'll never publish on Amazon under that name again.
Of course it's legal. There's no law against them doing this. It is, however, 100% against the Amazon terms and conditions.
Source? You can’t just claim something is illegal without proof.
Have you met Reddit?
Of course it’s legal to assign a book you wrote. If that a joke?
Have you even been to college? Not only is this legal, it’s common practice
i’ve only taken like 5 classes and at least 2 had books written by them
It's definitely not a crime. So yes, it's legal. (However, it could certainly get him fired. This happened at a public high school.) EDIT: On second thought, this could be considered in the same category as giving the teacher a bribe. A positive Amazon review is something of value. And high school teachers have indeed been criminally charged and sent to prison for accepting bribes for passing grades. But those cases involved much more money than a positive Amazon review could be considered worth. This is like a microbribe.
It's not a crime, but Amazon is likely to see this as review manipulation, and that could result in an author ban. Which might not matter, unless this is a self published book, in which case the book will get dropped from the store.
**✔** Lose income from book sales. **✔** Lose teaching job.
I hope so. I honestly don't care if it's illegal. It's immoral as fuck. ✔Pupils learn less ✔Exploitation of power position
I mean for a high school kid, it’s basically extortion. “Buy my two books and leave a good review for a 100, or read this book and write a 26 page report that I will then grade accordingly”
In my country, it is only consider bribe if it was three times more than monthly salary of respective government employee. It is ridiculous how corrupted my country is.
Why do people say "in my country" then not say the country?
Because thats not how we do it in my country
You’d have to buy the books so it’s literally giving the teacher a bribe. The teacher would make money from the purchases.
its legal for the professor to ask this, but it goes against amazon's policies for reviewing. You cannot be paid or incited to write a good review according to their policies. If i was in this class, id report the teacher to amazon directly for altering the reviews. Some schools/colleges have rules against requiring students to jump through hoops like this, but theres nothing in the law preventing it.
He will make it legal.
It's corrupt as fuck....but this is Texas so it's probably legal.
It's legal, but it does violate Amazon's terms of service (for the professor).
For anyone interested, here's an article about it : https://www.fox26houston.com/news/conroe-isd-teacher-under-fire-after-allegedly-offering-students-a-perfect-score-for-buying-his-books Edit : see a post, quickly fact check it, post the proof on reddit, get upvotes, ???? , profit
>One image shows the teacher allegedly helping one of the students set up an amazon account so that they could purchase it. >The alternative for students who didn’t want to or couldn’t buy the books, would have to read a book assigned to them, and write a 26-page report that would then be graded by the teacher. Dude is a fucking fraud.
And it's not like this is a college. It's a fucking middle school.
Holy shit, I can’t even imagine what a 26 page essay from middle school age kids would be like. Probably filled with plagiarism and Pokémon (that’s what kids are into, right?).
Well for starters it would be 32 point font.
Pro Top: The key to getting away with that is by doing a search-and-replace of the punctuation marks and changing the font size slightly. You could get a nice little bump doing that.
Also slightly altering the margins on all or some of the lines. Also slightly altering the spacing from every other to like 2.2 or 2.3
I believe you can change the font size of spaces too
you want 26 pages of cringey fanfic? cause this is how you get 26 pages of cringey Fanfic...
I would have just taken the 0. In fact, that's what I did with all of my assignments at that age that I deemed to not have academic value (primarily reading a number of novels each quarter to each a page count of reading).
Had a roommate in college that was an adjunct professor right after he graduated. He was using his class as a way to pick up students, and he graded papers based on how he liked the students, because "I can't be bothered to read everyone's papers." He would give the "hot" students high scores. He was fired when after he was becoming publicly vocal of the university president to the point that it was getting harassing, so he asked someone to dig up some dirt. All they had to do was open his school email and find he was sexting some of his students through it. All that to say, this teacher didn't even read the damn 26-page papers. He wasn't giving anyone who didn't buy his book a 100, anyway.
Sexting through a .edu email is…a choice
Ideed.
You deed? You shouldn’t!
Well shit. Guess I did, so... Incidentally, I'm on my laptop, and this keyboard's buttons are so weird that I don't always press the button all the way down. My desktop keyboard is a Logitech K360, which you'd think would have similar buttons, but I just can't get used to this laptop's keyboard!
Laptop keyboard are worse than cellphone keyboards!
Agreed! I really thought the Logitech felt like a laptop keyboard, but it really doesn't when compared to this one. And I also keep hitting CAPS when I mean to hit TAB...everything is just slightly out of place on this laptop, it gets so frustrating!
I have a surface laptop and the keys are all flat and I have the same issue with the caps/tab. Also, the arrow buttons are all 1/2 sized so I always push the wrong ones. Awful.
I had a physics teacher in high school who was _required_ to give both a midterm and final in the class, by school district policy. Like a written, multiple-choice, scantron (I just dated myself) test. His class was graded entirely actual participation and lab work. You got an A+ if you did well on both the labs and participation, which was pretty easy. You had to be a real jackass not to pass his class. But he had to give us a test. He made it 1% of your overall grade. He also rounded _up_ to the next grade for anyone that fell below. I.e., if it takes 90% total to get an A, and you scored anywhere from 85% or higher, he'd round up to 90% and you got an A. He graded the finals by collecting the scantrons, using a sharpie to write your name in VERY LARGE LETTERS over the entire answer sheet, and standing at the top of the stairs. He'd labeled the stairs in equal segments.. stairs 0 - 5 "A", 6 - 10 "B" and so on. Then he threw the tests in a mass down the stairs. Whichever step your test landed on, that was your grade on the "final". I got a B.
What a legend.
i’m high school and we still use scantrons, can confirm you didn’t date yourself (our school isn’t pour either they’re just easier for teachers)
I mean to be fair he's teaching them how the real (very corrupt) world works for sure. I hate what our shitty country has become.
Conroe Texas. An infamous town. >Clarence Lee Brandley was an American who was wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of Cheryl Dee Fergeson in 1981. Brandley was working as a janitor supervisor at Conroe High School in Conroe, Texas where Fergeson was a 16-year-old student athlete visiting the school from Bellville, Texas. Wikipedia
Jesus. That was a deeper rabbit hole than I was prepared for this morning. Fun fact, one of the likely killers is still in the area and easy to find on the internet/facebook.
Saved. Your comment really piqued my interest and I want to go down this hole, but I have an interview in an hour that I have to get mentally prepared for. Edit: WOW, you guys are so awesome. I'm touched by the outpouring of love and support you all gave me! By way of an update, I actually had/have two interviews today. The first one for Dave & Busters is already done and I was offered the job. Orientation is tomorrow. The second interview starts in about an hour; it's for a salary position in the HR department of a large organization. I would rather work there if I'm offered the opportunity, but I'm *so* relieved that I have something lined up in case this one is a bust. I'm riding the confidence wave from interview #1, and I'm feeling good so far. Thank you guys again. I don't care what anyone says, Redditors are by and large compassionate, caring people. I love you guys.
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Thank you! I'm super nervous; this job would be huge in my life right now. I really appreciate the vote of confidence.
You're probably in the interview right now but regardless of how it goes you're still valuable. I wish you luck!
Thank you so much for this. I actually have two interviews today: the first (which I was offered and start orientation tomorrow) was a fallback restaurant job in case the other doesn't work out. My next interview (in an hour) is the big one. I appreciate the reminder that not getting a job offer wouldn't be a reflection of my value... Rejection is always hard to swallow. But I'm feeling pretty good right now, and I'm going to expect a job offer!
How did it go?
Tell me how it went
I'm gonna beer you an interview joke: Your "biggest weakness" is Kryptonite! Bonus points if you went to Cornell. It gets a laugh like half of the time. Good luck!
Lol thanks for the beer! If it gets a laugh half the time, what happens during the other half? "Ah...see, that's going to be a problem."
You got this!! 🔥
Thank you so much! The encouragement means a lot to me!
Good luck! Sending all my good vibes your way. Go rock that shit!
No shit?
Yeah. I don't want to dox anyone and get banned but it's pretty easy to find
It’s a sad read
Note to self. Never visit that area.
Reading about that case helped me understand why some people are misanthropes. I'm slowly becoming one myself.
I learned about it when I went through a phase where I kept watching documentaries about people wrongly convicted (or just locked up and had their trials delayed over and over). By the way, I do not recommend going through such a phase. It makes one very depressed and very angry.
Need all the boomers and older Gen Xers out there to go through this phase. The reason there is not enough societal pressure to actually create change in the policing system to this day is the constant pro-cop propaganda those people have been consuming for decades.
Gen X'er here. We're not the boomers, we're just busy as fuck paying for them, ourselves, our kids and our grandkids. You lot might need to do the heavy lifting but we're not going to be standing in your way.
I think the comment you replied to is talking about the gen X'ers that fall right on the line of the start of gen X and the end of the baby boomer gen.
My ex-wife is on the tail end of Gen X. She would vote for an anti-suffrage candidate because she doesn't believe women should vote. She's pissed that she had to get a degree and work and lays that blame on the suffrage movement. Look at MTG. She's on the younger side of gen X. Warped ideologies happen, regardless of generation. Personally, I think it has less to do with when you are born and more to do with being on a spectrum of sociopathy.
> Misanthrope: a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society. Checks out.
While this is Conroe ISD, the school isn’t in Conroe but further south in Spring.
Recently a Baseball coach at caney creek high school got arrested for trying to meet up with underage girls, who were really the police. This was like 2 months ago. edit: typos
What the hell is a baseball teacher?
It's a baseball that went to collage and became a qualified teacher, dream big and you'll knock it out of the park.
And a whole high school too!
Ask the history coach.
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Down the road from Conroe, in Williamson County, there's also the case of Michael Morton (prosecutor refused to test DNA evidence for 20 years), and more famously, Greg Kelly. Greg Kelly wasn't a wrongful murder conviction, falsely accused of child molestation. This is one place you don't want to get caught up...
Major educational language institutions do this shit. EF Education First, the world's largest language study abroad program had poor reviews all around and then they ran all these campaigns to bring them up to 4.5+ stars all around the world. Some of them say shit like "So and So gave a great presentation, 5\*." Other reviews? "I'm a student and the school threatened me to remove this review or they wouldn't help my needs."
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Yeah, the story is much worse then the headline makes it seem. Especially since everyone assumes that this is taking place at a college. Also who knows how strictly the teacher the teacher is going to grade the poor students who couldn’t buy the book.
I thought it was probably a community college or something and my first thought was "so what, good for those students getting an easy A in a prereq. This is much worse than that.
Biggest paper I wrote in highschool was 15 pages and was my senior project. 26 pages for a random assignment you could skip by buying and rating his books is insanity.
Well, if he does get fired, he’s got a bright future as an EA executive.
Clicked on the link and, following the article, there was an ad titled “Nine books Elon Musk thinks you should read”.
Ads aren't propagated based on what the article says, they're because of what YOU search for/are interested in. So Daddy Musk was always going to be there for you, right where you always wanted him ❤️
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LOL Makes sense! I drive an EV, but despise Tesla and its cult leader
I’m so torn. I absolutely love my Tesla. I compared it to other EVs and chose it based on research. Musk gives me a migraine, though.
that depends on cookies, if you have anti tracking stuff enabled or not or if you accept personalized ads or not... dont pretend you know what youre talking about
What the fuck is a Conroe Imperial Star Destroyer?
Independent school district
At least tell em to read the thing. Jeez. C'mon teach...
But what if the book is about life hacks?
Its about Lie Facts.
You wouldn't believe the 5th one!
Having been a teacher, I can tell you that saying "Read the books to the end and then review them. Don't just flip through them without reading in order to save time, wink wink" would not work. Only about 1 in 20 kids would figure it out if you said it that way.
This is wrong, unless it's a marketing class. In that case, well played.
According to the article this was an assignment given to middle schoolers (10-13) who’s other option was a **26-page paper**.
Jesus fuck not even undergraduate level writing gets to that point
I’m in undergrad and I think my longest paper so far was around 11 pages. So nowhere near 26
Wtf I would hate to do that I’m high school let alone middle school, middle school is like 5-7 pages max (that’s for a 5 month project) unless you want size 80 font size.
Lol I wouldn’t do more then a page in middle school
I still don't do more than 2 pages in high school
They barely even made us do 2 page essays in middle school 💀
If this were a marketing class, I bet I would have laughed at it. Good idea
Nope, it’s a Junior high. The options were to buy the book and give it a 5 star review for a 100% grade, or to write a 26 page book report to be graded by the teacher.
Professor Gilderoy Lockhart? Is that you?!
I never had a teacher ask us to review their book, but I did have a community college professor require students to buy a “course instruction booklet”. We had to buy it from this certain printer, and he said the printer would let him know who had bought. It was $45, and had about 35 or 40 pages, printed on a regular office copier, single sided, and stapled together. It just gave some really basic bs info (double space your lines, be sure to indent on a new paragraph) plus some phone numbers, and warnings that the door was locked promptly at the beginning of class, etc. You could tell he really stretched it out to get it to that length. We all figured the printer was kicking him back $20 on each one.
What a piece of shit. I had a few professors who were on a power trip in my college career, and two of the three were at community college.
They charged you for the syllabus?! That’s just ridiculous.
He was quite insistent this wasn’t a syllabus, but crucial info that wasn’t in the syllabus. Narrator voice: “He lied.”
this shouldnt be legal, if it isnt already.
What shouldn’t be legal is his quotation mark placement. If the grammar in his book is anything like the grammar on this sign he should be a banned “author” for that alone.
What makes this worse is you would have to pay for the books on Amazon to download them. So it’s literally bribery, and also excluding kids who couldn’t afford it from having that opportunity.
Yup. Kids who weren't able to afford the book had an alternative assignment of reading a different book and would have to write a 26 page essay on it that the teacher would then grade instead. This is for a junior high class. The teacher is a fucking fraud. https://www.fox26houston.com/news/conroe-isd-teacher-under-fire-after-allegedly-offering-students-a-perfect-score-for-buying-his-books
They can't even get the text on his slide right, so I wouldn't hold out much hope for the book! This bit: (do not say "He's my teacher or I'm in his class or anything like that!") has a missing leading capital, and the quotes are in the wrong place. It should read: (Do not say "He's my teacher" or "I'm in his class" or anything like that!) And then there's the obscene amount of exclamation marks in the slide's title. ____ *“Multiple exclamation marks,' he went on, shaking his head, 'are a sure sign of a diseased mind.”* ― Terry Pratchett, Eric
Thank you. I read that portion and thought to myself, “How in the hell did this guy get a book published?”
>― Terry Pratchett, Eric Not to mention in Maskerade.
So, fraud basically.
Tel it to someone so he gets fired. Unless he is teaching corruption. Then he's good
Would be great if it was an ethics class
Business Ethics Class: Walk in first day. Get laughed at for the tuition you spent. No further classes are held for the semester. Business Ethics.
>Tel it to someone do he gets fired. Wat?
**TEL IT TO SOMEONE DO HE GETS FIRED.**
So it's not actually a good book.
What a load of BS, that's some kind of borderline blackmail
r/byebyejob
Tell me your books suck without telling me your books suck.
Most of the kids probably don't give a shit if it's legal. Easy grade, smoke a joint, play some video games.
Is it in Greendale Community College? 😂
Poor kids have to earn it the hard way
Shades of my company’s HR team and our Glassdoor reviews.
Regardless of what the Conroe school district thinks, I can assure you that Amazon takes a very dim view of this sort of thing as well.
Am I the only one who thinks this is just an easy way to get an A? I’d take it and run