WebAssign: Or, why my school's attempt to go green is a piece of junk.
69 replies, posted
In the past several years, there have been tons of advertisements and even legislation promoting and requiring a conforming to a standard of better environmental protection. Also known as the "green" standard. Tons of household materials more than likely have a stamp on them stating that this item doesn't use any harmful chemicals, letting the consumer know that they're helping the environment when they buy this product.
As a result of this, my school decided to cut down on paper use by giving some classes assignments over the internet. As of now, only a handful of classes (most of which are in the science department) use this program for their homework assignments. At first glance, I thought this was going to be a pretty revolutionary take on homework. When I'm at home I'm on the computer 90% of the time so why not log into my account and do my homework? It sounded fantastic.
Upon visiting the site, you're greeted by some guy leaning against a border wearing a red shirt with white stripes and there's a giant college campus in the background. Kickin' rad, right?
I mean, look at this shit. It looks clean yet very professional and simple at the same time.
[IMG]http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/7403/webass1.jpg[/IMG]
You enter your log in information and push "Log in" and you're brought to your classes assignment page. Here you can view all of your past assignments as well as current assignments. It's quite nifty because I can review my past work if I'm confused on current assignments. Another great thing is the questions are immediately submitted, meaning I can get notified if I'm right or wrong right away. Another great thing is most of the multiple choice questions have around ~20 attempts on them, meaning I can perform 20 trial and error attempts and get the question right eventually.
"Great, this is pretty cool!" you might be thinking. You're suddenly given a problem where you have to write something in a specific syntax that [I]only [/I]WebAssign recognizes and the link to the operator list is fucking [U]broken.[/U] You try and google it but nothing comes up. What are you to do? Rely on the trial and error, of course!
BUT WAIT! [I]You used all your tries and got it wrong anyway![/I] You know why you got it wrong? It wants you to round to two significant figures, not three. It didn't even tell you that!
Oh WebAssign, you so crazy.
Sometimes you're given a problem like "Finish the following equation." Such as Force = Mass * Acceleration. In the case of the question, it wants you to fill in the Mass and Acceleration part. Me, being the natural stupid fuck I am would put in MA, because I've always seen the equation as F = MA. But [I]noooo[/I], I need to write it in lowercase. I experimented with all sorts of different multiplication operators and even tried swapping the letters around so A came first and M came last (which shouldn't matter because multiplication is commutative.)
About a week after school started a bunch of people began encountering errors with the website. Any time you clicked "Submit Answer" to record it on the servers, it would redirect you back to the assignment selection page and the answer you wanted to submit wouldn't go through. I had this issue too, and some people still have it despite having contacted WebAssign support.
Aside from the shitty answer table it reads from that doesn't compensate for any other answers than those it checks for and the retarded errors it encounters when your flash drivers are outdated, or you didn't update Java, or you're running with IE6 for some stupid reason, there is one upside. There's this fucking awesome drawing application that some questions use where you are told to draw something and label it. These are always fun because I draw something ridiculous.
[IMG]http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/6231/deloreanfbd.jpg[/IMG]
tl;dr WebAssign is a flaming pile of crap and I prefer paper and pencil over digitally submitting my answers any day.
hey OP at least your dog can't eat your homework
that glass is half full not half empty bro
My school is online to. Except we draw shit online AND I CANT DRAW WITH A LAPTOP. Dude your luckier then me. We use laptops
[editline]10:44PM[/editline]
What i mean is it has eBooks eLessons eTutors eEVERYTHING. And eArt which is the worst and i mean WORST of all classes
Seems a little useful, it'd be helpful too considering your homework is always on a website.
We use [url=http://quia.com]quia[/url]
I'd take this over what I went through in school any day
Paper sucks
I hate how my school is online but you still go there. I have to take a fucking metrorail there cause i cant ride a bike all the damn way there. Id be tired and late. You probably the luckiest person on facepunch.
[editline]10:48PM[/editline]
damn automerge
[QUOTE=bepassley;25299179]Paper sucks[/QUOTE]
Paper cuts :saddowns:
My university uses WebAssign, though all of my current professors don't use it.
From what I hear, it's a steaming pile of shit when you're trying to draw anything, especially in engineering classes.
That sucks, with my teachers I can either turn in a hard copy paper or email assignments I can do on the computer to them. But forcing it on the computer? Yeah, that'll do a lot of good.
I like the drawing you did lol. I've been watching Back to the Future and been seeing references all week.
My school uses [url=http://moodle.org/]Moodle[/url] and [url=http://www.elluminate.com/]Elluminate [/url]
I like you for your brown eyed girls ga-in avatar and I agree with you no matter what
OP has mad drawing skills.
My submit answer ate my homework
My Statistics course also used this. Piece of utter shit. It's very slow, too.
Used that in my calculus-based physics course. I promptly switched to a algebra-based physics course and we use MasteringPhysics.
[QUOTE=Mister Sandman;25299862]My submit answer ate my homework[/QUOTE]
my dog ate my RAM
I have used it, and it is a quite the piece of dog shit. Just as any "right or wrong, with no partial credit" online stuff is.
I have to deal with two different programs exactly like this.
Ugh.
I remember having to use [url=http://sam2007.course.com/LoginSam2007.aspx?ReturnUrl=/]Course[/url] for a few assignments in my computer class. It's very annoying in how terribly slow it can be, and how specific you have to be with the way you complete the module. You must do it a certain way, and if you miss a click, or accidentally click anywhere else, you've used up one of your three tries.
Just use a Cartesian coordinate system with vectors on it for the free body... what's the point in actually drawing the shapes? That's what I always do anyway.
I'm in my 3rd week of calculus based electricity and magnetism physics class. (darn those curved line charges get confusing sometimes.)
"Your answer is within 10% of the correct value." I got that so many times.
I hate this system, but I had to use it for 3 Physics courses.
Real schools use blackboard
[QUOTE=jordguitar;25302048]Real schools use blackboard[/QUOTE]
White boards are better.
Always hilarious when a relief teacher writes in permitent marker rather then white board marker, an then spend five minutes trying to rub it off, and then realize the dumb mistake they made.
whiteboards are more "HURR ECO GREEN" than computers, which use electricity
We use [url=http://www.renweb.com/]this motherfucker[/url]
@OP The problem with answers not being recorded is something I've linked to Chromium and FF, at least on my end. Try using Opera to submit your answers/
My physics class has a weekly assignment through a program called Quest.
You're giving a worksheet of about 15 problems (the angles and measurements in the questions are different for every student) and you have to input the answer into the program. You have to be very specific though, because the margin of error for your answer can only be 1%. Each wrong answer removes .7 points from the original 10 points per problem. So this worksheet says that it's worth 150 points, but when it's in the grade book, it's only worth 15, which I'm fine with.
We still have to print off the PDF of the problems and do the work, so I don't see how this is helping us at all. Why not just give us the worksheet in the first place?
It's just a dumb, convoluted system.
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