Ethics question

[RollTideTyler]

cliff notes: have to spend 100 bucks on a piece of paper to pass a course, while a good portion of the class does not. Considering stealing said paper. College text book prices bitching/complaining thread.

background:

If you are currently a college student, or have been in the last 20 years or so, you are probably aware of the bs that occurs with new editions of text books. I am in my last year of college and have learned to accept it, until now.

Publishers will make new editions of text books with little to no changes to the material sometimes. The changes are purely cosmetic (cover art, layout etc...) I am not really sure how the business end of it works specifically, but it is my understanding that this is done to balance out the fact that university book stores will buy books back from students, and resell them used, thus cutting into the sales of the publisher.

Now here is my ethics dilema...

I am a Restaurant and Hotel Management major. There is a course this semester that has a lot of people in my major in it, but also some business majors taking it as an elective.

The first day of class, the professor basically states that she will not be using the text book, and you dont have to purchase it, the test material will come 100% from lecture. HOWEVER...if you are a major in this field, there is a certification test at the end of the semester that requires a special red scantron found in the back of the new textbook.

So basically i need to drop $100 + tax for a single sheet of paper, while non majors will get the same educational experience from the class that i will by not buying the text book.

I have never stolen anything before in my life, but i am tempted to go into a book store and just cut a hole in the plastic wrapping of one of these books and grab the scantron. Who will lose money from this? the bookstore will just sell the book used for 75 bucks or so, so a loss of 25.

I have always just dealt with the insanity of book prices before, and accepted it as part of my education expenses, but this for some reason has upset me. I read an article that mentioned that since 1994, student book prices have been increasing at a rate of 4x that of inflation.

So my morals are dropping for this instance, but chances are im too much of a pansy to actually steal this thing. What do you guys think?