Textbooks

The second year students always tell us not to buy any of the textbooks. For each of our courses, we get a syllabus (like a course reader) which is very comprehensive for all the lectures. The syllabi are written by the lecturers, and knowing all the information in the syllabi is sufficient for acing all the exams. We just don't have time to do supplementary readings in textbooks.

It's a pretty interesting system. The syllabi are directed to our learning objectives and tailored specifically to our curriculum. It's very useful to have this concordance between our lectures and our reading. However, I also think there are problems with this system. Since they are not textbooks, the syllabi have a higher frequency of mistakes in them. They aren't as useful as textbooks as a reference. But all things considered, I think it's a good system to use these tailored syllabi primarily and textbooks supplementary.