How to Deal with Sent Back Solutions 0

One of the most discouraging things that can happen to our solutions authors is receiving a “sent back” batch of solutions. These aren’t fun for anyone and we do our best to prevent this from happening.

But just remember that this doesn’t reflect on your intellect, passion, enthusiasm, teaching ability, learning ability, or any other facet of your being. We promise! It just means that there’s room to improve and that you’re going to get better as you keep working problems. We’re here to help you improve your work, so don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for help.

We’ve heard many times that (after the initial shock) send backs actually teach our authors many valuable techniques for writing that actually help them work more efficiently.

Nonetheless, re-working problems can be time-consuming and annoying. So, to save you some time and guesswork, here are some of the most common reasons for send backs and the quickest ways to edit your batches for re-submission.

  1. Lack of written explanation. All solutions need at the very least one descriptive phrase or sentence of written explanation per step.  Before each step, add a little bit of description so students can follow logically.
  2. Lack of introduction to solution. The introduction can be as simple as, “Consider the given vector triangle for the velocities of the cars A and B.” Don’t just start randomly telling us what the variables stand for in the solution. Give context first!
  3. Missing conclusion statement. Just write a simple sentence like, “Therefore, the velocity of the car A with respect to the car B is 15 m/s acting at an angle of 35 degrees with the horizontal.”. Then box the “15 m/s” as the numerical answer.
  4. Lack of individual steps separated by delimiters (those line thingys that you insert between steps). Just add in some delimiters if you have adequate explanation. Do this where it makes the most sense for your problem. Or maybe you didn’t write enough steps and now you’ve learned to break up big paragraphs or blocks of mathematical solving and place them in their own steps with explanation.
  5. Incorrect answers or miscalculations. These do happen, even for mechanical engineers! Just go through and fix them. We understand that mistakes happen.
  6. Plagiarism. Just don’t plagiarize or copy anything from the text. It’s not okay for anyone. Your work must must be your own.
  7. Not following the textbook model for solving. Make your life easier by reviewing the textbook examples before solving and using the authors’ template for problem-solving.
If you didn’t read any of that: My best advice overall is to study the guidelines before you start to work. Also, ask us for sample solutions in Word document format. You can even use these exemplary solutions as templates for your own work!
As always, we appreciate the great content that you produce and we never want you to feel discouraged. We’re here to support you through the authoring process, not to make it any more challenging than it already is. We know you’re experts, now we just need to support you on your way to becoming expert solutions authors!