This shit ass site proposes a paying plan for downloading student notes and I’m so fucking tired at the idea that they basically got a monopoly on it. How can I download the docs?
So are you able to view content, but pay to download? If that’s the case, I could probably write a scraper for the site.
If you have to pay to even see the content, then you may have a bigger problem. Try pooling resources with some of your fellow students, to have one person download all the content, and then make it available to everyone else.
Another option is to expose your instructors. There’s a high probability that they are getting kickbacks, especially if this is at college level. Maybe in the form of 10% of each dollar spent by one of their students. Or, they might be getting free equipment or content from Docsity, in exchange for forcing students to use it, and offloading the costs to students.
When I was in college, one of my instructors used these “clickers” that cost students $40 per semester to rent. They used radio to allow submitting realtime quiz answers during class. Students were scored on how many questions they answered, not whether they were correct. If you didn’t pay the clicker fee, you lost that 10% of your final grade.
I was suspicious, so I looked into it. It wasn’t hard. The clicker manufacturer advertised kickbacks on their own website.
Based on the website his professor(s) are definitely making side money forcing students to pay to download their notes.
https://www.docsity.com/en/store/sell
No idea if that is legal for them to do or not but it is shady as hell.
Dont just consider if its “legal”. But also if it is aligned with institution policy.
Depending on the details maybe it would be the kind of thing theyd have to declare when publishing? Like as a conflict of interest.
Could be other equity type avenues depending on details.
When I was in college, one of my instructors used these “clickers” that cost students $40 per semester to rent. They used radio to allow submitting realtime quiz answers during class.
iClicker.
F#$* those things.
Faculty at the two higher eds I worked as staff at hated the cost of books and student materials too, and tried their best to keep them down. Most of them. Publishers like Pearson and Cengage started doing things like discounting teacher’s editions and/or including curriculum (slide decks, all level of evaluatons and more) in exchange for becoming the learning portal and getting their hands on that sweet, sweet PII and marketable data, not to mention the yearly rolling editions of their student texts with single-use portal key codes.
This free market correction sure is taking its time…
Im not on desktop so this is more of a guess than an actual solution but Ill try to make it easy to understand.
They have what looks like a rendering filter over the javascript (docs are loaded with JS so JS blocking doesn’t work.) So in theory they have the source file linked in the javascript so if you find that link to the file, you can do that using the inspecter tool. you could download it using something like wget.
Another option would be google dorks as they may have made some files accidentaly public.
filetype:pdf site:“doccity.com” intitle:“file name your looking for”
Get in touch with someone who already paid it and offer them a reasonable(it may vary from one person to another) % of the original amount to them.
Or you can coordinate with some other people and bought it splitting the cost.
