Glenn Wagstaff
Shivani Shirolkar
As another term at university begins, classes are in full swing. Students are hurrying to stay on top of their game by making it to their lectures on time, studying for fast-approaching exams, and of course, submitting their assignments on WebAssign, the school’s most-used online platform for homework.
WebAssign was founded and launched in 1997 at NC State University by a group of researchers in the department of physics. It is now headquartered at NC State’s Centennial Campus, and is used at a large number of universities across the country for a variety of classes as a platform for students to submit their homework on. According to NC State’s Office of Technology Commercialization and New Ventures, more than 500,000 students use this service at 1,500 institutions during any given semester.
The goal of this service is to provide instant feedback to students after they have entered their answers, so as not to keep them waiting for their work to be manually graded. This is the third semester at NC State in which I’m using WebAssign for my classes, and I am honestly less than impressed.
For starters, it is not offered as part of the education students receive through their college tuition. WebAssign is a paid service, taking an average of about $50 for each course, per semester. I find the idea of having to pay another agent to acquire the mere permission to finish homework quite unreasonable.
Students are already paying for resources like textbooks and material taught; worksheets should be included in these costs. Furthermore, students bear the total expense of these online assignments — instructors do not have to pay to use WebAssign.
For the excessive amounts charged by WebAssign, it does not have a very bug-free interface. There were a couple of times when I entered in my answer for a question, only for the page to crash unexpectedly, causing me to lose my data after hitting submit. On some occasions, WebAssign also declared that their services would be “unavailable for certain periods due to high user traffic.”
What can you do when this happens hours before an assignment is due? During one such incident, my physics professor told us he’d extend the deadline for our homework since many students were having problems logging in. He then realized that he, himself, couldn’t log in, preventing him from making any changes to the deadline anyway.
Glitches like these defeat the original purpose of designing an online study system for students, which is making the process of turning in and grading homework easier.
WebAssign seems to have predefined answer keys for its worksheets, and any answer that does not adhere to these keys is automatically graded as incorrect. This means that if a student decides to approach a problem from a different angle from what was intended by WebAssign, they would not be given credit for their reasoning if their input doesn’t match what WebAssign expects – regardless of whether it logically makes sense.
I faced this issue quite a few times during one of my calculus classes. My answers were in accordance to what had been taught in class, but WebAssign refused to accept them unless they were formatted in a specific way. Students unnecessarily lose points and negatively impact their GPA due to the “only one right answer” protocol followed in WebAssign, especially when dealing with formulas and derivations, where multiple expressions can all mean the same thing.
On WebAssign, the instructors of a course decide how many attempts students can get wrong on a particular question before locking them out of it. After students exhaust their share of attempts, they can no longer receive credit for that question. So there is no way for them to know where exactly they’re going wrong in a problem, and whether their only mistake is formatting.
Thus, it is not a very useful tool for assignments out of class, when the main aim of education is rectifying conceptual misunderstandings and mastering the coursework — especially when it comes with rather forcibly imposing a price and its functioning being a flight risk.