I’ve been teaching review session for a while. Normally what I’d do is post the questions and complete solutions on our website after the review session for students to access. Starting last semester I only started posting the questions and final correct answers (instead of the full solutions). So students would either have to attend the review session to get the right answer or attempt the questions on their own.

This stirred a lot of controversy among students, but I didn’t let that bother me. I literally got over 100 nasty emails from students complaining about how they are somehow owed the full solutions to the review questions. On a side note, the review sessions I hold are coordinated by the Accounting Society on campus and have absolutely nothing to do with the course itself. It is merely a service that we offer as an opportunity for students to learn.

If you really need to know, the truth is that students will learn better this way. Once what ended up happening (last year), was one of the questions that we had on the review showed up on the exam… EXACTLY IDENTICAL. I was surprised to learn that despite the fact that students had seen the exact same question merely days before, many still ended up solving the question incorrectly. This spoke volumes to me and really only meant one thing: When provided with full solutions, many students choose not to actually solve the questions themselves and instead simply review the solutions. So that’s what happened last year. This semester I wanted to get that point across in a clever way. So this is what happened…