New Approach to the Use of Solution Manuals in the Teaching of Higher Mathematics

This paper presents a new approach to the teaching of undergraduate mathematics in which the students are allowed a free access to the complete solutions manual. Our method consists in assigning a very substantial amount of homework problems and allowing the students to consult with the solutions manual while doing it. Our philosophy is that the purpose of the homework is not to test the student’s knowledge but to give her/him the opportunity to acquire and experience knowledge. The student is thus being exposed to a very large number of examples in which she/he actively participates, with the comfort that if unsuccessful to do the problem alone, there is a resource which can help. Remarkably, we have so far not experienced blind copying from the solutions manual, which was our fear to start this program. We attribute this fact to making clear early in the semester that the tests are very challenging both in content and level of difficulty. We observe a big jump in the students motivation, interest in the subject and performance on exams. All students in the classes in which we used this method improved their tests scores very significantly. Additional benefit which we observed is a remarkable increase in the students’ self-confidence and study-independence. .