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In my university they want us to send them our work (math course) via regular post instead of email. They explanation for that is that according to what they say the document content may get changed on the way from my computer to they server. I'm saying that I do not belive it. If I save my work from word into pdf and then zip it I just cannot see the chance that the contents of my pdf file will be different to what I've sent. Who is talking ballocks? Me or they?

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They of course
Most probably they are facing the horror of reading multiple word files using different version of Office/normal.dot ... and the only solution for them is getting back to paper :-)
God save the trees of Amazonia ...

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  • They may also be worried about receiving viruses and unreadable files. Or possibly, that by forcing you do use the post you would be committing some sort of mail fraud (a felony) by submitting a plagiarized document.
    – Chris Nava
    Oct 27, 2010 at 19:28
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The content may apparently get changed if you use a font to display mathematical symbols (for example) that they don't have installed on their system.

So to get the electronic form to work consistently they'd have to specify specific fonts to use or even a specific version of Word which might not be available to all students. Even specifying that documents be supplied in PDF format might mean supplying this software to all students.

These are just excuses and issues that can be solved, but they all take time and (possibly) money. They are perfectly valid reasons and they shouldn't hide behind a solvable (and potentially) spurious technical reason.

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  • yes but I would first convert from doc to pdf so I do not really see a problem Oct 27, 2010 at 10:46
  • @A-ha - true, but then the college would have to specify that and possible supply the software to enable everyone to do that. Yes I know there is free software out there, so cost shouldn't be an issue, but there's still an administrative cost etc. I agree with @Warnaud in that the college is using it as an excuse.
    – ChrisF
    Oct 27, 2010 at 11:00
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    Should be doing your math in some kind of TeX anyway...
    – Shinrai
    Oct 27, 2010 at 16:36

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