A+ for ideas; D- for proof-reading

I was just adding some references from a book I've been using into my bibliography file. Because the format of the reference list in the book only used authors' initials, and I prefer to have the full name in my files, I was checking each reference by googling it for the full version before I copied it over.

Of the nine references I checked in this way, five were incorrect! The mistakes included year of publication, authors' initials, the wrong word here or there in the title, the wrong page numbers... And I know the mistakes were in the book's reference list, not on the net, because once I discovered the first couple of errors, I went to the publishers' and authors' own websites to check the rest.

And we complain that students make careless errors!