Message to Instructors

 

Dear Colleague,

We are grateful to our many colleagues who have adopted Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes since it came out in 1978, and our commitment to maintaining its quality--including maintaining this page of resources for instructors--remains steadfast. There are two phenomena, however, that work against the book being as effective as it can be. We are asking for your help in dealing with them.

  • Please do not post solutions from the Instructor's Manual, especially on Web sites with public access. If fully worked-out solutions are posted, you can be sure they'll come back at you in future semesters when you assign the same problem, especially from members of student organizations with complete files of old tests and solutions to tests and homework problems. Moreover, the solutions will soon be in circulation throughout the country as students download them and e-mail them to friends at other colleges. Giving students outlines of solutions and making them responsible for filling in the details is much more instructive than handing them complete solutions, which effectively removes all incentive to think any more about problems they missed.
  • Please do not encourage students to buy used or imported texts. We know how much texts cost and are sympathetic to students trying to economize on them. You should know, however, that when students buy used texts or texts that booksellers purchase overseas at highly discounted rates and then resell, the bookstores and resellers make nice profits but the authors and publishers get nothing. This drives up textbook prices, makes the critical and monumental task of writing undergraduate textbooks a relatively unrewarded one, and discourages potential authors from writing them. You may not be able to stop all of your students from buying resold texts, but please don't encourage them. Many thanks.

Sincerely,
Rich Felder, Ron Rousseau, and Lisa Bullard