I would just like to share a story, and probably an opinion as well. When I was doing my STEM undergraduate degree a couple of years ago, I took a course in which I had to use MATLAB. I won’t disclose too much information, but it was a course involving computation.
Well, we (the students) weren’t given a student/institutional license of any sort, but the course coordinator still insisted on using MATLAB. We took it as an implicit instruction to “somehow” obtain MATLAB. In the end, one guy in our class pirated it and distributed it the whole class.
Before that though, I did approach my course coordinator, asking them if it’s possible to use other software like GNU Octave, which is a clone of MATLAB. Personally I think it should also possible to use any other programming language like Python for example, since the important part is the computation part, in my opinion. They refused any discussion and did not even consider alternatives, instead basically forcing us to “obtain” MATLAB. How else? Well.
As I have said, we all pirated it in the end.
I did something quite interesting though, which is that for every quiz, assignment, and projects that we had, I’ll run the same exact MATLAB code on GNU Octave, to see if it’s compatible. And it is. It works flawlessly. There’s only one function that GNU Octave didn’t support back the (this was a couple of years ago), and even then, it wasn’t an essential feature, you could use other software for that function as well.
By the end of that semester, I had compiled almost all input/output of the MATLAB code alongside its GNU Octave’s counterpart, to demonstrate that we didn’t need to pirate MATLAB to get through this undergraduate course.
Regrettably though, I didn’t follow through. So sad!
Do you think piracy is justified in this case?
I’m an old geezer, having graduated from college over 30 years ago now… This doesn’t have to do with piracy, but with professors. One advanced course I took covered topics that included AI and chaos theory. It was taught by a visiting professor from another country and she was terrible. It was clear she was just regurgitating what was in out textbooks without trying to really understand it.
One day she was out and we had another professor with an actual background in AI fill in. We learned a lot that one day.
Our college had anonymous evaluations that students would fill out on the last day of a course, and the college really pushed the claim that they were taken seriously. Before the day came to fill these out most of the students in the class got together and formed a plan. We all agreed on how we would fill out the questions. For example, one question asked what we liked best about the course. We all agreed to write something along the lines of “the day the professor was out and the other professor taught instead. We actually learned a lot that day”. We never saw that professor at our college after that year ended, and like to think our evaluations were a big part of the reason. The bottom line is that we provided a united front for our grievances through those anonymous evaluations.
If your college offered similar sorts of course/professor evaluations I would have tried to do the same thing in this case. Get as many members of the class to band together and point out the issues of having to “obtain” MATLAB, and being unwilling to consider free alternatives. If your college doesn’t do these sorts of evaluations then getting multiple students to write complaints to the department head, etc. might be a viable alternative.
This is a good idea. I am a student representative for public student housing and sometimes we have to resort to encourage other residents to do some “mail-bombing” (as in sending a lot of emails not the Teddy K method) to get things done.
We also have tose evaluations, albeit we do not coordinate what to write there, our professors aren’t that bad and when one was it wasn’t necessary for her to get so many bad evaluations she was fired.