This semester I am a TA for a Calc 2 course. At my first meeting with my instructor, he mentioned in passing that "Homework is always easier than an exam, because homework questions come from the textbook, so they always know which section the problems are from.". It's just anecdotal, but that does align with my own experience taking calculus courses: each section covers a very specific technique, and the problems in that section are designed to be solved using that technique, and often very little else.
It occurred to me that, since we regularly have 2-3 sections due for a single homework assignment, this 'bug' could be worked around. The 'manual' way to do this would be to (1) type up every homework problem into LaTeX, (2) randomize their order into a document, and (3) hand them the worksheet as a homework assignment
[ I would probably say explicitly that they are taken from the textbook. The goal here isn't to hide the fact that they're textbook problems, merely to make the section numbers less visible so that the student has to pause to think about the tools they need to start a problem. ]
But of course step (1) is fairly labor-intensive, even if there isn't any TikZ work involved. If I am using a very common book, like Stewart, is there an online tool to, e.g. create worksheets by typing in a list of problem numbers?