Disclaimer: The Ivory Belltower is purely satirical. Don’t take it too seriously.
After NC State adopted WebAssign as it’s primary method of delivering the proper dosage of stress-induced anxiety to its students, a strange and hitherto unobserved phenomenon occurred.
According to graduate researchers Ashley Lee and Sarah (pronounced “sah-rah”) Sunshine, “the students have literally become addicted to those little, green checkmarks.”
Sunshine and Lee sat down to talk at one of those incredibly sketchy tables under the stairs in Poe Hall.
“The students need their fix,” Sunshine said. “We had several cases just last semester of students who accidentally didn’t enroll in any classes that use WebAssign, and the results were worrisome to say the least.”
Sunshine took a selfie with her pumpkin spice chai frappe latteccino before continuing.
“We’ve observed students wandering the libraries in search of laptops, computers, cell-phones, anything that might have an open assignment on it,” Sunshine said. “When they find one, they begin answering questions as quickly as they can, and when Google can’t provide the right answer, we’ve even seen them pull out a textbook and actually learn material they don’t need to know in order to receive those little, green checkmarks.”
She went on, “We discovered a Deep website where students hire other students to let them do their homework, and we were horrified at the methods of payment, trade of illegal substances being one of the more modest forms.”
Lee explained in between selfies that, for their thesis, they’ve been studying a small cross-section of students for the past year.
“We’re paying a few students in Port City Java gift cards to let us test the effects of these confusingly dangerous checkmarks,” Lee said. “We’ve found that when paired with sleep deprivation, unavoidable procrastination and the stress that comes with it, anxiety, sexual frustration and a slight abuse of amphetamines, these seemingly harmless checkmarks become the self-administered reward in a nearly perfect example of classical conditioning. After only a few assignments, the students automatically begin associating the checkmarks with positive emotions, releasing larger and larger amounts of serotonin with each correct answer and throwing them deeper and deeper into the depths of addiction.”
“Those poor students,” the girls said in unison, “it must be awful to be addicted to something so stupid.” Both then took another selfie with their coffee cups.
