After being contacted by The Crimson for this article, HPPS sent an e-mail message to Crawford and said her students would receive a refund for the extra money.

According to Davis, the delay was caused by time it took for HPPS to contact the financial office and determining which students had purchased the source book.

Davis says this incident was an isolated case of overcharging. Two randomly selected syllabi and price breakdowns examined by The Crimson revealed no discrepancy between the articles in the sourcebook and for which students were charged.

But since most professors do not examine a breakdown of their sourcebook's costs, the possibility of overcharging remains.

"I can't help but think there are lots of students affected by this that just don't know it," Crawford says. "If I hadn't pursued and pursued and pursued this, I just wouldn't have known."

Costly By Comparison

While Davis says overcharging is unusual, some professors say HPPS' prices exceed those of other sourcebook producers.

It is difficult to compare sourcebook prices because syllabi are rarely identical, but several cases of identical sourcebooks reveal large price discrepancies.

Sociology department chair Christopher D. Winship uses exactly the same course readings in classes at Harvard and at MIT, and found the HPPS reader vastly more expensive.

This year, he is sending his students trekking to MIT to purchase the reader, in order to save money.

Instructor Marshall L. Ganz, who teaches a course at the John F. Kennedy School of Government with a syllabus that is almost identical to that of Sociology 96, says the Kennedy School reader costs about half as much.

"There's a systemic issue here, which is that [HPPS is] not accountable," says Ganz, who is also a teaching fellow in Sociology and Social Studies "Students pay what they're told to pay and nobody complains."

One reason students and faculty don't complain is that there are few cheap alternatives available.

Although McKay Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics EricMazur says he was surprised that his students were charged $39.00 for the production costs of a physics sourcebook he noted that alternatives to HPPS are few.

"The cost charged by HPPS is substantially higher than I had expected," Mazur wrote in an e-mail message. "Had I known this, I might have gone to an outside provider, although I'm not sure how I would have resolved the logistics of distribution and payment."