The first reason that seems to be commonly given by classes is that online homework helps students get instant feedback.  “How Wonderful it is,” claimed my math professor, “that now you kids can check your answers as soon as you’re done with a problem!“  That sounds like it would be a great thing and, to be truthful, it is.  It’s nice to know that you have the solution correct as soon as you’ve finished your problem.  An extension of this is also the claim that “With online homework, you can see exactly how many points you have on any assignment to help you better keep track of your grade in the class.“  This is also true, though it does reveal the fact that students right now may be so lazy they can’t hold on to papers returned to them long enough to record the grade given. But with these advantages, online homework isn’t bad, right?

If online homework managed to fulfil the goal of grading assignments in a fair way that helps students learn, I would be all for it.  Unfortunately, it falls short in many ways.

No partial credit for work

One of the best things about showing your work on a problem is that you can receive partial credit for what you’ve done, especially on long engineering problems.  Maybe you get everything but the final answer due to a misused formula?  With online homework you get no credit for what you’ve done.  You’ll take the zero and like it!

Accuracy is questionable at best

One thing that is consistently stressed in many of my classes is that the problems are a way of taking real world problems and simplifying them to highly idealized models.  When you’re doing a math problem with 20 steps, where should you round your decimal places?  Should you keep significant figures?  Significant figures only works if the problem is worded with them in mind.

Complex answers are tough to input

Maybe the reasons I’ve given earlier don’t matter to you–you always keep everything to 20 significant figures and you get all of your answers correct.  Well, why don’t you try keying this in:

Good luck.  That was a math problem for me earlier this week.  That’s ridiculous!  If you mess up something, good luck getting it back in!

Technology is never uniform and not always compatible

OWL, mentioned earlier, was a site I used for chemistry homework for two classes last year.  It was amazing in the fact that it managed to use Flash, Java and Shockwave for various assignments.  Unfortunately, as a poor Linux user, I had no access to Shockwave.  That meant I either had to log on to a Windows computer (sometimes having to go to a computer lab) or lose those points.  The sad thing?  Most of them were just Shockwave applets that asked a question and accepted a numerical answer.  There was no reason for that technology to be used there.

If the technology fails, the student is at fault

Homework is due for all students at the same time.  OWL would be incredibly slow and unresponsive every week on Friday starting about 3pm, two hours before the homework was due.  At 5:01, though, it was as if a miracle had occured–everyone would log off and OWL would become completely usable.  I realize that this makes an argument for time management, but I should have the ability to do my homework whenever I want to do it up until the due date.  Webassign has this problem too, though to a lesser extent.  If your internet connection goes out, you’re without luck unless you find another way to get around that problem.  Last year my connection went down in my dorm on the night of a homework problem being due.  Whoops, too bad!  Even though the dorm IT manager agreed that the connection was down, the Physics professor wouldn’t accept that as an excuse.

Decreased productivity

Online homework seems to take up increasing amounts of time in class, especially in math where the answers often require complicated formulas to be entered.  Every single math recitation I’ve been to this year has had at least one fifth of the time taken up by students having problems inserting answers in the system.

I guess it really is too much to ask for the TAs to do their jobs and grade the homework.  I realize they’re busy and I realize that this provides a much fairer grading experience between TAs, but that’s always been a harsh reality of school.  Why strip students of points simply because they’re running into problems inserting an answer into a computer?  That’s just laziness.