Opinions on WebAssign?

One of my former students is taking Physics and has homework on WebAssign. He manages to screw up the sig figs in an answer and sends me an e-mail or gives me a call. We usually get it straightened out right away, but please let you students know that a machine is looking at their answers, and that machine ain't flexible.

General Lee, students like webassign. I like it also. They like that it gives them instant feed back so it makes the process of doing homework much more efficient for learning. On the downside, it is not free (but fairly cheap) and for some students it just drives them crazy. This is why I make it optional (but strongly recommended).

If you look at other online homework systems, they really suck compared to webassign.

Itâs alright, but comparing it to the way my Mastering Chemistry was set up last semester, I found the chemistry more useful. It had âhintsâ that if you used would guide you through the problem and the professor had set it up so using the hints didnât count against you. The feedback was also more useful, if I answered a question with say the number of moles instead of the molarity, the software would politely tell me my answer was for the number of moles and what I needed to find was the molarity and why.

In Web Assign, a wrong answer provokes a terse and vague, âyour answer differs by 10% to 90%â and if it has the ability to provide âhintsâ itâs not configured to provide them. But that difference could be due to the computer literacy between professors. My physics guy is getting up there in age, and itâs almost painful to watch him futz with the laptop when he brings it out in lecture. The first week he couldnât demonstrate how to log into Web Assign. The log in page was asking for what school he was from, and he kept leaving it blank, or misspelling ectâ¦

So I guess it kind of comes down to it works, but there are some problems where it would be nice to have a little more feedback like I had from Mastering Chemistry. Now I have to study for the physics test tomorrow on energy and stop distracting myself.

I don't know how it is set up where you work, Chad, but if it allows for multiple attempts to answer the question, say, more than three, be very very leery of using it. We use CourseCompass for a lot of the lower-division math classes, and one of the problems we encountered was that students would simply enter their answers again and again and again . . . until they got the correct answer. Having done so, many of them felt no particular obligation to study any further, or even come to class. Luckily, that particular problem is easy to fix by limiting the number of attempts.

I have only used WebAssign once, and it was with a book that is not heavily supported yet. Very few of the features were available for problems from that book, and very few problems from the book had been made available in WebAssign.

I have also been using Mastering Physics for a year, I have more experience with it, and it's with a book that is extensively supported by the publisher. In general, I like the availability of instant feedback and do-overs. Yes, there are students who try things mindlessly until they get it right and collect their partial credit. The reality is that for any homework system there will always be students who find ways to not learn. But online homework systems are definitely superior to paper homework, in that the feedback is available immediately for those who are willing to try to correct their mistakes and learn. It beats the paper system where you do it, hand it in, wait a few days or more, then get it back when you're already busy with a new task.

So online homework isn't perfect, but it has a lot going for it.

As to the particulars of WebAssign, having used Mastering Physics I think that WebAssign has more potential. It's easier to customize and control things, easier to write your own problems (not that I did much of this, but I did a bit), and easier to make documents available. It has some of the capabilities of Blackboard in that regard. It's also cheaper than Mastering Physics. But I can't give it a full recommendation over Mastering Physics until I've tried it with a fully-supported book.

Anyway, I definitely recommend online homework, and WebAssign seems to be a decent enough system in comparison to its main competitor.

Webassign is easier, faster, more efficient, and it gives instant feedback. All good things.

Still, I stopped using it after 6 semesters. My main beef is not being able to see their work on problems. Getting the right number is less important in intro physics than learning the method, in my opinion, and I want to see what they did. Symbolic solutions entered with markup code is not a reasonable substitution.

Basically, it is my opinion that "right for the wrong reason" is no different than "wrong."

On the down side: I spend many, many more hours grading than any of my colleagues.

If this is the system I remember from one of my Physics classes, it wasn't bad. But I still find it utterly horrifying that it means students are required to pay a special fee for permission to do their homework...

I do get the point about paying an extra fee for permission to do homework, but:

1) If problems are in a book you have to buy the book. OK, there are ways around that, but still.

2) If you were taking a lab class or something else with a hands-on component (e.g. building 3D models in an architecture class), you might have to buy some special supplies before you can do your assignments.

3) To the extent that the program is providing instruction as well as letting you do your homework, the fee you're paying is for instruction. It's cheaper than the tuition.

I used WebAssign during my last three years teaching HS physics, using both Hewitt's college-level Conceptual Physics text and Cutnell & Johnson's trig-based text. I didn't ask permission from my school head; I just did it. For HS students, the fee was $4 and some change. With our small class size, I just paid the student fees from my budget.

The first year was a little rough, since it took me a while to figure out WA and how best to use it. A perennial problem was dealing with students who are not really computer-savvy. Despite frequent reminders not to use the AOL web browser and to save your answers as you work, some still did. For those, we reverted to paper assignments. Many just never got in their heads that having the text and their notebook nearby would be beneficial. But we are talking HS students here ...

After the first year, reactions from the students were mostly positive. The kids who perennially forgot to do the work, lost their papers, mislaid their books, said it helped them stay organized. They liked the instant feedback (for the non-essay questions) and the running tally of their course grades. [WA has a built-in gradebook, which I used to record all their quiz, test, lab report, etc., grades.] Detractors did not like the problems accessing WA - it was sometimes slow -- and the lack of flexibility in scoring the answers.

On a scale of 1-5 (5 being highest), the students that first year gave it an average rating of 3.4. Not a glowing reco, but not a fail either.

The following two years I stayed with WA the students had similar reactions, but none suggested I ditch it entirely. Some parents squawked to the head, apparently with the misunderstanding that a computer was grading their Little Precious' homework, but I asked other parents to counter with glowing recommendations. End of that story.

Of course, for the Hewitt book, most of the questions were essay-style. I had to read them to award a meaningful grade. The advantages there were legibility and paper-preservation. I was also able to grade more quickly and leave meaningful comments to accompany the grades.

WA is not a panacea, but I still would recommend using it. I found it flexible enough to suit my needs (in fact, a WA expert could design some fine assignments -- my son's CS prof at Purdue used Java in his assignments, I think). I would suggest to your students that they keep their intermediate solutions and calculations in a notebook so that you can review them in case of WA getting too draconian in its scoring.

I've left that school, and I don't know if my successor still uses WA. If he has, it's a pity.

Uh, I meant that students were not saving as they worked, discovering the hard way that closing the window or browser meant all their work went bye-bye.

Also, there were random cases where a student would click save or submit for one response and lose everything when the page refreshed. It made no difference what browser they were using, and there were no discernible patterns to the glitch. And of course, it never happened when I used WA.

It made no difference what browser they were using, and there were no discernible patterns to the glitch. And of course, it never happened when I used WA.

There is a ghost virus stalking Mastering Physics. It never happens to me, very few students report it, but a handful swear that it will periodically refuse to let them submit answers. Generally they report that the glitch goes away after a half hour or so.

There was one guy who adamantly insisted that it was happening all the time. I asked for screen shots showing the answer boxes blacked out (which was what he said was happening). I got screen shots showing, well, anything except that. Then, after many conversations, he finally said that Mastering Physics worked fine until he started using a new computer. OK, so maybe there's a weird OS or browser issue. But he brought the laptop to my office, and it miraculously worked.

I don't really believe that the Mastering Physics glitch exists. Not after its most vocal proponent was so EPIC FAIL on producing evidence.

+1 on web assign

I used it when I took calc physics using Serway's book. Getting the right number of allowed submission is important. When I took it 10 submissions of the whole assignment were allowed. I think the current rule at my school is 3 or 5 submissions per questions. Either seems reasonable. It's also nice that WA gives some varying wrong answer prompts ("Sig Figs", "10-90%", "power of 10" etc.)

I'd certainly say $15/term is reasonable for instantly graded homework. I'm not sure how it would work in upper level classes where the process is much more important relative to majors level intro classes.

Philip Roberts

I use lon-capa, which has all the advantages and disadvantages of being open source and free. I think our math people use Course Compass (which many of them loathe due to errors and other limitations that are particularly severe for mathematics), and some others on the science side use WA or MP depending on the book they adopted. But what you use is less important than how you use it.

I could go on for hours on how to use it. For the moment, I will just say that even the best HW program will not make up for bad teaching, although some appear to have that as their ultimate goal.

I don't understand the "show your work" argument, since I evaluate that on exams. Besides, you can always collect their solution for an on-line HW problem if you think that has value. The problem with grading HW is that you rarely get N solutions from N students, yet only the egregious cases of carefully copied nonsense can be flagged as bogus. As with on-line HW, you only find out who actually did the work when you see the work submitted during an exam or quiz unless you give distinctly different problems to each student.

I personally am highly against webassign - I've been forced to use it in multiple classes, and have had a horrible experiance when I was made to use it in physics. The system provides no real incentive to actually do the work, and with its gracious amount of rejected answers (50 before the question becomes locked) it doesnt encourage the learning of the subject but instead how to brute force your way through a problem. My teachers have seemed to fall back on web assign as another way for them to slack off, as its trial and error system encourages teachers you just say "keep trying" or "take it slowly". Due to my teachers ignorance to checking the amount of tried answers, near the end of the physics class I broke down and created myself a program to just mass input answers. Web assign bases itself off the textbook you use and thus looking at the textbooks answer key for example problems (which are VERY similar to web assigns) can tell you approximately where the answers would fall at (such as in the 1.5 - 3.2 range, or so on) and then with its 2% leeway, a little bit of math will show you where to start your guessing at (25 guesses above and below * the 2% leeway) and you can then work your way to the answer. For some students in my class, the allowance of 50 answers made it so they could complete the assignment but it would take hours to do manually inputting the numbers. For me and a few other students, it opened a door to completing assignments within 5-10 minutes by booting up a program and entering a few numbers from the back of the book into it. If you use it be wary of students cheating through it, as it is exceptionally easy.

WebAssign, like any other assignment vehicle, requires instructor supervision and monitoring. It's just as easy to cheat on paper assignments. Setting up WA incorrectly and failing to check submission times and IP addresses just invites student abuse.

I use WA for HW and testing. I have a large 130 computer lab at my disposal that can accommodate the largest of classes. WA works very well except that students think I cannot monitor what they do. I have six up for cheating with the usual telephone calls about how they are innocent or they are really, really sorry. Apparently my warnings are not enough. We will be using secure browser. Here is what they do:
1) Log back into WA and add to their test scores back at the dorm. Easy catch.
2) Have another student log on to the test and use Cramster to calculate the answers and enter them. They secret a cellphone and text the test password out of the testing center.
Easy, easy catches. Still, I need to use securebrowser and restrict the IP. This will just remove some of the temptation. The students who colluded communicated the test password out of the testing center. This is willful and not a "crime of opportunity" as it were.

Webassign should restrict the number of IPs that can logon any account to ONE.

My school has a system setup for online testing that is free. I think that it is disrespectful to the students when a teacher chooses to go outside of the school's adequate resources and use something that costs the student more money. I'm assuming that Web Assign is free for faculty seeing as forcing a whole class to use it can rake in a large amount of money for Web Assign.

My school has a system setup for online testing that is included in the cost of tuition. I think that it is disrespectful to the students when a teacher chooses to go outside of the school's adequate resources and use something that costs the student more money. I'm assuming that Web Assign is free for faculty seeing as forcing a whole class to use it can rake in a large amount of money for Web Assign.

My school has a system setup for online testing that is included in the cost of tuition. I think that it is disrespectful to the students when a teacher chooses to go outside of the school's adequate resources and use something that costs the student more money. I'm assuming that Web Assign is free for faculty seeing as forcing a whole class to use it can rake in a large amount of money for Web Assign. If a teacher does not like the system already being paid for, they should become proactive and move to have it changed!

I absolutely hate WebAssign. I am a student who is using it for precalculus. It's mandatory, costly(price is in addition to the required text), and faulty. It takes hours longer to do a homework assignment simply because the pages load VERY slowly, and often crash after you submit an answer. This is extremely annoying. You would think that collecting 15 dollars from many thousands of students would afford them some competent programmers. Grrr.

Timothy

Thank you for asking this question.

Before exposing your students to webassign, please consider the actual cost per value. This software is needlessly driving costs up and reducing the quality of education around the country.

As a student any online grading system that consistently drops connections and fails to provide adequate information to answer questions is a turn off. It simply makes class more of a chore than a learning experience.

Thanks again for asking,
-Jon

i hate webassign. im currently trying to complete one, and im about to scream im so annoyed. the only good thing about it is the fact that you can submit answers multiple times, so its easier to get a 100 (all our homework grades are webassign). the guy who said its an inflexible machine checking webassign is right, and we dont all have a former teacher to help us out. in fact, i have no one to help me, and i just about kill myself over it every week. the way you enter any numbers dealing w/ sig figs, scientific notation, etc, is just annoying. and my teacher doesnt post the 'hints' someone else mentioned. half the time, i dont know whether to put my answer in scientific notation or not. and the price is ridiclous. most people at my school are poor, and a TON of teachers use this (including almost all the science teachers). its even more unreasonable when you consider that you have to purchase a new account for each class, and each year. most of my friends have webassign in at least 3 classes, and thats $45 down the drain for a homework grade. and like i mentioned before, most of them, and their parents, cant spare $45 or more. also you HAVE to have a computer to work on it, so for someone like me whos rarely home, and has to do all their hw in class, on the bus, or waiting for the bus, its REALLY inconvenient. and i cant even go to the media center during lunch to do it, because the assignment locks at 8:00 AM. i have even more rants against it, but im not going to take the time to type them up; i need to get back to my webassign.

basically, if you REALLY want to save trees by doing it electronically, just post it to blackboard (which i LOVE by the way)

I posted this on your other entry about WebAssign, but I think it's very important to consider the full cost of this product. You might say, "Oh, it's only $15." But it's $15 every single quarter/semester (more for quarters, as a matter of fact, even though colleges with quarters have lengthier sequences -- for instance, 2 semesters of Intro Chemistry is equivalent to 3 quarters of Intro Chemistry, so quarter-students would automatically be paying more, but WebAssign raises the price anyway). And it's $15 for *every single class* that uses it. For instance, for just this quarter, I'm expected to pay $47.85 for the privilege of turning in homework in three different classes. For people with stable jobs and careers, this doesn't sound like a lot of money. For college students, this IS a lot of money. And I'm paying it every single quarter or else I'm failing the class entirely because I do not have the funds to pay for it. (And honestly, I really do not. And yes, I have a job. And a work-study job. And a scholarship. And a student-loan. And I'm at a state school. And I haven't bought anything fun (clothes, food, even a movie ticket) since my last birthday. But haven't you heard? College is EXPENSIVE.)

I am a student. I have to pay $63.80 per year (including summer quarter) per class for the privilege of turning in my homework.

I also pay an average of $150 per primary textbook (and yes, these are often used books, except in the onerous cases when the publisher suddenly updates a book then ships it out 2 days before my class begins).

I pay an average of $39.95 per lab manual per class (and since I'm a science major, there's a lot of classes). I then pay an additional $21.95 per class for a required lab notebook that consists of 100 pages of carbon paper with our school's logo stamped on the cover.

I find no benefit to WebAssign. Please consider the fact that not only would your students be forced to pay a fee to turn in homework, but they are also being forced to pay many more fees than just tuition. WebAssign and textbook publishers' companion websites for books are perhaps the worst offenders because you are paying a fee for something that expires. You are renting the privilege to do homework.

I'm a student, and my physics and chemestry teachers both use webassign. There are a few things that drive me crazy about it-

1) The quantity of work assigned combined with strange due dates such as 10:00 PM, then it locks you out.

2) When it locks you from an answer after trying it too many times. It doesn't tell you where you went wrong or help you in any way. The only way to correct this is to see the teacher or get help and this is tough for people like me with sports and such.

3) Often times, I will learn how to do something in class, but when I go home and look over my notes and attempt a problem, I can't get it correct. I've talked to friends about this and it happens to them as well.

4) It lacks individuality in the aspect that it doesn't grade for methodology, just answers. Often times i feel like a machine doing these.

I know this is subjective, but to all you teachers out there- webassign should either be optional or have a more flexible due date. The combination of bad things weighs even with the good things.

I've used webassign to teach, but may be trying mastering physics.

Webassign is great. I give students 6 tries per problem, but the instructor can set it up anyway they want. I use it to report all grades to the students too. I'd like to know how mastering physics compares.

My first assignment, due the next day, is the intro assignment for mastering physics. After the first week I rarely have problems or questions about webassign. There's always a few students who hate it, but that's to be expected.

And kudos to the students who wrote a program to enter answers that use the webassign responses to bisect to the true answer! I'll keep limiting my tries to six!

Webassign is useless. The computer is terrible at checking answers, so it won't accept a correct answer unless it is formatted in a specific way. It is slow, bad at explaining things, expensive ($35 a quarter for me), and the professors basically use it to cut down on their workload (while multiplying ours). It's a pathetic excuse for a piece of software. Professors love it, students hate it, but that doesn't matter to the professors because they get to save time for themselves, and of course it does not come at their expense.

Where is this $15 per access key for WebAssign coming from? For chem and physics it's going for 60$ EACH.

I feel like I'm being punished here! Paying for tuition and books is one thing, whose great idea was it to pay to do homework? What's next? A coin slot on the water fountains?

I'd like to dedicate my time to learning the material in the course, NOT on how to use WebAssign properly so I can understand why some of my answers aren't being accepted!

And what about students who don't get to go home right after class to mess around but have to go to a Domino's Pizza and deliver pizzas until 11pm? Its hard enough my reading or working math problems in between pizza runs after the evening rush hits!

WebAssign may sound like sheer awesomeness on paper, but it's just another way to exploit students financially. I hate.. HAAAAAATTEEEE it.

Another problem with webassign is how the homework reinforces learning. The way many teachers use it is to completely replace physical homework. Students are given an assignment and a due date and left free. For a student who is trying to master the material, webassign feels like a punishment. Since there is no focus on work done, the temptation to cheat is immense. Webassign rewards students who have completely mastered the material, and students who cheat. A student struggling to learn, or reasonably comfortable with the material will still lose many points on the assignment. There is no adequate way to check work, either for procedural or conceptual mistakes. Webassign is not a teaching tool, but a disciplinary measure.

Someone was wondering about the different prices $15 vs $60. The picture I get is that the the base cost of webassign is around $15 but if your instructor is using questions from a textbook, the textbook publisher marks up the cost of webassign in exchange for the [copyrighted] questions. Thats why people pay different amounts. For instance I was given 2 different options for my intro calculus course sequence (2 quarters): I could have paid $35/quarter for access or paid $58 once for any class that used that textbook (which was used for both quarters). The upside of that second option (which I used) was that If I (in theory) didn't pass the class, I wouldn't have to pay again when I retook it.

This is the first semester of my using Webassign, and my general impressions are of complete bewilderment and hatred. If it were a tangible thing for webassign to feel, I might be inclined to go to great lengths in having it suffer the same misery I go through every week working with the program. In fact, my dealings with webassign perhaps have made me so psychologically disturbed that I even fantasize about finding it's creators and strangling them in a dark alleyway. Ahh, that felt good to type. When I took calc a and b, it never took me more than 2-3 hours for homework per section; now, it's nearly double that. Furthermore, I hate working on computers; I need to flip pages, read w/ fingers on a real textbook, write with pencil to get anything ingrained or internalized. With a textbook, I can bring my homework around and do it when I have free time; with webassign I'm glued to my chair at home. Clicking and trying to read their syntax just doesn't cut it for myself. The program is also vague, and if you enter something in wrong, never tells you what you did wrong. I hate it with a passion so much and it's taunting red x's that I'm deliberating whether or not just I should just take the hit it will do to my grade by ignoring all online assignments and work purely from the textbook.

I am a chemistry student and webassigns make me cry. You cannot ask your teacher questions if you have any and most of the time, they are so difficult that i just end up looking the answers up on the internet.

as a collage student i can tell you that WebAssign is one of the worst technological monstrosity ever constructed! I had used the program in a previous math class, which i inevitably switched out of due to the program. to begin with the numerous bugs will read a correct answer as being wrong, pushing the save work key will delete all the work that one had previously completed, the graphing tools are a joke. But what i find the most irritating is the fact that professors openly admit to using us, i.e. the students, as guinea pigs to test out the program; so my GPA suffers because the school that I'm giving money to decided to use WebAssing. Moreover, it lacks the ability to replace work from the book, for example if i were to have difficulty with a certain problem i couldn't refer back to my homework in class for help, due to the fact that its online. The other problem is that instead of submitting the homework in class and receiving full credit with corrections made by the teacher, it grads you on how many answers were correct/incorrect; and if one dose answer wrong there is no way to tell where you went wrong. Its hard enough learning a new subject, why should I have to do more work by learning how to use a program that's theoretically still in beta testing. I do not recommended this program unless you want to receive 500 emails and 50 phone class daily, from students suffering from the numerous problems associated with this so called "learning tool".

I have not used this particular program but I have used similar ones Mastering Chemistry for two semesters, Mastering Physics for one, Coursecompass for a statistics class and Mastering Calculus for two classes.

For certain things it really isn't that terrible if it is used as fluff with short answer or multiple choice questions. Where the rub comes from for me that just makes it frustrating beyond belief is that none of them are very informative as to why you get an answer wrong, hints are useful in certain cases but just as often are vague and uninformative. However the thing that on many occasions has driven me to rage is that all of these programs want answers submitted their way and no other way.

For example 1.75 is the same thing as 7/4 and while it sometimes asks you specifically for a decimal or a fraction often times it doesn't which would be acceptable if it would tell you your answer was correct but not in the right format but it usually doesn't do this either it just tells you you're wrong which makes you lose points for having a correct answer. Likewise for things like Mastering Chemistry if you are doing something like drawing a lewis structure it will be incorrect for the most ridiculous of reasons for example if there are resonance structures it will consider one correct and the others incorrect or for that matter sometimes it is just flaky telling you answers are wrong that quite simply aren't.

I have not used this particular program but I have used similar ones Mastering Chemistry for two semesters, Mastering Physics for one, Coursecompass for a statistics class and Mastering Calculus for two classes.

For certain things it really isn't that terrible if it is used as fluff with short answer or multiple choice questions. Where the rub comes from for me that just makes it frustrating beyond belief is that none of them are very informative as to why you get an answer wrong, hints are useful in certain cases but just as often are vague and uninformative. However the thing that on many occasions has driven me to rage is that all of these programs want answers submitted their way and no other way.

For example 1.75 is the same thing as 7/4 and while it sometimes asks you specifically for a decimal or a fraction often times it doesn't which would be acceptable if it would tell you your answer was correct but not in the right format but it usually doesn't do this either it just tells you you're wrong which makes you lose points for having a correct answer. Likewise for things like Mastering Chemistry if you are doing something like drawing a lewis structure it will be incorrect for the most ridiculous of reasons for example if there are resonance structures it will consider one correct and the others incorrect or for that matter sometimes it is just flaky telling you answers are wrong that quite simply aren't.

Sorry about the double post, but I would also like to point out that I hope nobody would argue that homework is unnecessary but at the same time these programs are left up to the whims of professors that without the program would have been a little more reasonable.

From my personal experience for example my calculus professor assigned 125 problems every week in additions to class work. Combine this with 30-45 problems per chapter for Physics and/or Chemistry and it quickly becomes overwhelming to some and frankly one or more classes assigned homework will suffer because of this. All of this is my opinion based entirely on their use this ignores that they can frankly be expensive as well. It is a tool to easily prone to missuse in my opinion.

I bought a brand new math text book, bundled with the Webassign access code. Of course I lost the code, and that is what Webassign is banking on to make more money out of students because they want me to pay $37 for another code. $37 is a new pair of shoes for my son. So,it's back to pencil and paper homework for me.

I'm a student currently using webassign and let me tell you that we HATE it. Its buggy as hell, and very hard to input answers in the correct format. Most of us end up just writing out the problems and submitting them to our teacher anyways.

Just say no to web assign until they higher decent web developers. I didn't think someone could be that horrible of a programmer for such a big company.

hire*

Idk if it's just me but I don't like the fact that you have to pay extra to do your ASSIGNMENTS! I can understand books, lab equipment, but this program is essentially for a professor's convenience, at best. I'm taking math 121 as a dual credit and in the course description it said nothing about paying anything. Why not just do the old school way of paper turn in? Science courses and food electives I can understand, but assignments can be done from just books! If I was a the teacher, I would make it optional. It also makes web assign think they are the priority. Also, when my sister first used this, unless it had the exact answer it was looking for, it would be wrong.