Posted by Richard Heathfield on 03/10/07 14:36

robert maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t said:

<snip>

> If you want to validate a textbook, you have a group of students
> actually try learning from it, you don't have a bunch of experts
> nitpick it to death.

That depends on what you're validating. If you're checking that the book
is comprehensible to students, then by all means use students in your
test suite. But if you're trying to ascertain whether the information
you are giving out is *right*, then you had better break out your
six-pak of independent experts after all. Students, by definition, do
not have enough information to judge whether a book is correct or not.
Just a day or two ago in comp.lang.c, a student defended an illegal
construct by saying it was in his textbook, and surely textbooks
wouldn't have mistakes in them...

I see no value in teaching students incorrect information, no matter how
readable it is (unless, of course, your objective is to become the next
Herbert Schildt).

--
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/1999
http://www.cpax.org.uk
email: rjh at the above domain, - www.

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