Today’s college education is lacking something: a hand-graded assignment. Our college education is currently being contracted out to companies that, in the end, provide no benefit. Companies like WebAssign, MyMathLab and others are being widely used throughout college campuses. On top of that, students have to pay for this service. Since when is it OK to charge students to do their homework? I’ll give the benefit of the doubt, class sizes are increasing and it would be difficult for a physical sciences professor to grade over 100 assignments. But why pay WebAssign? If all the students just paid their $30 or $40 dollar fee to the respective department, they could hire TAs to grade. This would help with the major downside of online work, giving constructive feedback. Missing a question on WebAssign simply gives you a red ‘X’ whereas a person can point out where you went wrong. It would also encourage students to work the problem out on paper, which is one thing I rarely ever did with online work. Not to mention this could give strong upper-class students the opportunity to put “TA” on their resume since they could have the opportunity to do so. The benefits are far-reaching when it comes to a hand-graded assignment, especially when compared to the dreaded red ‘X’.
Andrew Gannon
senior studying applied mathematics