[impendia]

> the faculty has something of a phobia to ... students' access to help outside of the department.

Math professor here. I am most certainly happy if my students get help outside the department, and I think my attitude is quite typical.

We can be a little bit wary of some kinds of help. Too much math teaching consists of "If you see a problem that looks exactly like X, here are the steps you should memorize to solve it."

But we don't care per se if you can solve problems of the shape X, Y, or Z. We want you to develop your skills to the point that all of these lie naturally within your skill set, that you could do them even if you've never seen one exactly like that before. As such, some kinds of tutoring can be counterproductive.

But most aren't. In my opinion your professors' attitude was quite foolish. Kudos to you for seizing the initiative and figuring out for yourself how to best learn the material.

[gregmac]

> Too much math teaching consists of "If you see a problem that looks exactly like X, here are the steps you should memorize to solve it."

A significant amount of math testing is basically checking if you've memorized some theorem (and then can solve it), so is that surprising?

[impendia]

> is that surprising?

No. It's a difficult problem to mitigate.

There are always going to be some students who want to learn the minimum possible to pass the exam, and who will never work with the material again. Although I do my best to be respectful of such students (indeed, in some circumstances this can be a perfectly rational point of view), my pedagogy is aimed at the student who sees my class as something more than a meaningless hoop.