WebAssign: Or, why my school's attempt to go green is a piece of junk.

[Archy]

these online essay grading things only slow down learning and stifle creativity

[DainBramageStud]

[QUOTE=Sobotnik;25314009]I feel so outdated, I write all my shit on paper with a fountain pen.[/QUOTE]

Me too. I really hate that schools are introducing fancy "e-learning" crap just for the sake of it being new, and not that it has any educational merit. I'm normally not a Luddite, but until these systems are actually intuitive and more flexible than pen/paper/whiteboard I'm skeptical of them.

[ss013r]

My school uses Quia for Spanish class. It's okay, really. The problem is when you have to type something with an accent mark in Spanish, you have to manually click on a little button. Also, the spell check always thinks you are trying to type in English, so everything comes up as misspelled. Not the worst thing in the world, but if I accidentally pressed the wrong key, I wouldn't really know until it told me I got it wrong. The one good thing is that when you are done, it tells you your score, where you messed up, and what the right answer is. It also allows you to redo it as many times as you want even [I]after[/I] it told you the answers.

My English class, however, uses turnitin.com. It's supposed to prevent against plagiarism, and requires you to use MLA format citations and bibliographies, WITHOUT ERROR. If you cite something as ":words:."(John, et al) you get it wrong. You need the punctuation after the citation, and if you didn't, it thinks you plagiarized. Other than requiring you to be perfect, no real problems. But since it only allows you to turn in one document per assignment, some people couldn't turn in their bibliographies. Their fault though, as the teacher said, specifically, to have the bibliography as part of the document.

Oh yeah, one last thing: teachers requiring you to turn in papers by Saturday at noon is just unfair.

[Lazer Loop]

[QUOTE=Mike_013;25336150]
Oh yeah, one last thing: teachers requiring you to turn in papers by Saturday at noon is just unfair.[/QUOTE]

This 1000 times.

I didn't know about the MLA thing on turnitin actually. Guess my teachers don't know or don't care.

[ss013r]

[QUOTE=Lazer Loop;25336534]This 1000 times.

I didn't know about the MLA thing on turnitin actually. Guess my teachers don't know or don't care.[/QUOTE]

Maybe it's optional. Inevitably you're going to get about 5-7% plagiarism because it picks up common phrases. Also, on one of my papers I have a 22% plagiarism even though one "plagiarism" is 14% and is properly cited. The quote has a parentheses in it so it thinks I'm using that to cite it, which is incorrect.

[Spetzaz]

This is the type of site that needs DDoSing.