I never figured that out myself. Perhaps so the teacher could tell at a glance where the student went wrong?
I mean that they would only answer half of the problems in the back of the book. Usually that meant picking either only the odd-numbered problems (ya know, #1, #3, #5, etc), but occasionally it would mean picking the even-numbered ones (#2, #4, #6, etc.)
I assume they did this so that a student who needed help could get it, but if students merely copied the answers from the back, they would still only get a 50% grade for that, which is still an F, i.e. failure in the American system.
I remember buying the teacher’s book for A Level Mathematics in the 1970s. The pupil’s version only had brief answers in the back (and it might have been every other question, can’t recall). I disguised it in a plain brown wrapper labelled ‘Lives Of The Great Saints’. Some bastard stole it in the end - I’d still like to know who it was.
What class are we talking about for the teacher’s editions? Some people are mentioning college classes, but my wife is first grade teacher, so that’s what I think of when I think of teacher’s editions. In that case, there really is no work to show: The questions are the sort of “2+3=?” The point of the teacher’s edition is not to show the answers, which are trivial, but to have bigger margins in which to show many other approaches to teach the material.
Yea, my first response was based in elementary school, where I remember seeing those books first.
But when the others are mentioning the student editions having some answers, I remember my college pre-calc and physics classes only having half of the answers, without a full description.
Likewise with me, I believe I have a calculus textbook that has answers for the odd numbered problems. It’s also quite likely that many teacher’s editions do provide useful pedagogical information, alternate approaches, lesson plans, additional bibliographic information, etc. that might be useful to studentds.
My question can be seen in a similar light to laws against posession of firearms. (not legal advice) E.g. where I live, it is illegal for me to carry a concealed handgun without a permit. If I carry a concealed handgun without a permit, it is not a defense to a charge of carrying a concealed handgun without a permit that I did not intend to commit any violent crime using that handgun.
Amateur Amazon used bookseller here:
Selling Instructor’s Editions or Annotated Instructor’s Editions will get you banned from selling on Amazon. They follow a ‘2 strikes you’re out’ policy in most cases.
There are two types of Instructor’s eds:
One type has answers - Annotated Instructor’s Edition
The other type has no answers, and differs from the student edition only in that the cover and copyright pages have different language/art on them - Instructor’s Edition.
The nomenclature varies between publishers somewhat.
By the way, for anyone who has never seen an instructor’s edition, there are a couple of pictures on this blog:
That’s an instructor’s edition, not an annotated instructor’s edition.
If you want to buy an instructor’s edition, your best bet would be Alibris.com or Biblio.com. Biblio.com and Abebooks.com are your best sources for cheap Chinese/Indian grey market books, too.
On edit: Teacher’s editions are barred on Ebay, although enforcement is spotty. The best place for a casual consumer to sell their teacher’s ed’s copies is to “Textbooksrus” which is the only online book buyback site I know of that buys them, aside from Abebooks buyback, which is operated by Textbooksrus.