How do you handle inconsistencies in lectures/textbooks?

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I have always had a great deal of frustration arise when I see that textbooks (sometimes within the same course, and sometimes when one course leads into another) have inconsistencies in the information.

If you notice this as well, how have you handled the issue with your instructors?

I haven't found a really good way to approach the problem proactively, until after a test and I find myself in my professor's office discussing the test and how the inconsistencies led me to choose the answer I did.

It is also very frustrating when the lecture contradicts the text - I don't know which way to go when test time comes.

Just ask the professor.

Never had that exact thing.

But have seen instructors unable to field questions from students that I could have answered myself. And seen the instructor bs their way through it. You have to bite your tongue and not humiliate the instructor, and not say anything.

Drives me crazy. Definitely ask your professors, when that happens. The prof may have read some new research which contradicts a theory presented in a text book; in some fields (the social sciences in particular), there may not be one correct answer to a problem, so your prof may present a different school of thought than what is presented in the textbook.

Learn to think for yourself and not just to memorize what the textbook or professor tells you. If in doubt, do further research (though on the Internet in particular you'll likely come across even more contradictory information). Make up your own mind based on various sources, don't trust just one source of information, be it a book or professor.

I wish it was this simple. A great deal of my courses actually present tests in a multiple choice format, to mimic the MCAT. So there is little room for interpretation of your answer choice. It either gets marked correct/incorrect on the scan-tron.

This really only happens in my science courses, it was never an issue with non-science. And more often than not, it is in my biology coursework. You would be surprised at how different text books can be when it comes down to the details (such as the amount of ATP produced in the citric acid cycle - some texts list it as 2 ATPs, while others list it as none...noting that it only produces GTP, which in turn is used to produce ATP).

So I am left to try to figure out which way my professor wants me to answer the question...in a multiple choice format.

I can really strongly relate to this. In fact, once I started as a physics student, but I switched to mathematics because I simply could not stand the multitude of interpretations present even in an "exact" science such as physics. Of course, also in mathematics there is room for discussion, but hardly when it comes to the correctness of proofs. A mathematical statement is either true or false. (Although I have to admit that there do exist statements for which this cannot be decided, but these are not so often encountered in everyday (student) life.)

If you are really that much bothered by ambiguity (as I was), then one advice I can give you, is to find a field where this ambiguity is not or barely present (such as mathematics, logic, certain branches of computer science and linguistics).

Another approach would be to "embrace" the ambiguity, because in lots of fields it are often the ones that doubt and question who make progress. So, further in your studies you may actually benefit. However, this does not show in a multiple choice test.

Last edited by Volterra on 06 Feb 2014, 2:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yeah, the frustration is enough at times to send me back to my office in tears (I already have a degree in journalism, so I work full time and do school part time - taking around 8 hours a semester).

My goal was/is to be a surgical pathologist (MD). But I am not sure if I will be able to survive medical school after dealing with so much anxiety from my undergraduate courses.

My wife and I have discussed me pursuing a degree in physics (which would be a long road), as I really did well in those classes and always enjoyed the work. But I am also considering pathology assistant school, which would only be a two year program.

Well, as a journalist you should be used to information that is at best an approximation of the truth and more often than not full of factual errors and subjective (and often malignant) interpretation. Finding it hard to comprehend how you can take such issue with inaccuracies in textbooks, but work as a journalist (if that's what you do, that is) ... doesn't the stress of having to work to tight deadlines without being able to double and triple check information you publish drive you crazy?

This also really bothers me. It's bothering me just thinking about it...