Webwork (Doesn't Work)

I was helping some freshmen with their Calculus yesterday, and I got to experience, first hand, what could possibly be the absolute worst application of technology in mathematics education. I think that this is the first semester that Columbia is using Webwork for some sections of Calculus, and I certainly hope that this trend will not carry on.

Ok, so maybe that's a little harsh. But I was seriously disturbed. And, as someone whose graduate work is mainly focused on using technology to improve the teaching of mathematics, I was even a little bit insulted.

When these students called me, they told me that they needed help with Mathematica. I agreed to spend some time with them, because I really like Mathematica, and I certainly know it a lot better than I know Calculus. But I was surprised, because I know that they no longer use Mathematica in the undergrad courses.

So, when we met, I wanted to first understand why they needed to know how to program Mathematica, instead of just learning to integrate by parts. That's when they showed me Webwork.

Webwork is an online application (developed at the University of Rochester) that attempts to make math homework more effective and efficient by providing immediate feedback on the validity of the students' answers (that's the sales pitch). It also provides automatic grading of assignments. Webwork generates a unique set of problems for each student, which is supposed to prevent cheating.

Here are a few of my issues:

- There is absolutely no partial credit. You either have the correct answer or you don't.
- The teacher is not able to see how the students think and approach the problems, and by the time that they see their work on the exams, it is usually too late.
- Students end up spending a ridiculous amount of time formatting their answers, instead of learning the material, so that the webapp can interpret them correctly. (I am sure that this can be fixed with better programming on the backend).
- Since only the answer matters, students can get away with using Mathematica, or just asking a tutor to do it for them.
- Because the problems are computer generated, you can't assign particularly clever problems. I saw the problems that were assigned in Calc II, and they were all of the form "solve this integral." I don't believe that this is the correct way to instruct students in abstract mathematical concepts (especially not at a thousand dollars per credit).
- The application does not limit (or track) the number of wrong answers that are submitted before the right answer is submitted. This encourages guesswork, along the lines of "try 2pi... no?... ok try pi... yay!"

A lot of this can be corrected and improved with a well thought-out configuration (for example, allow them to only submit the answer twice, and after that, they get points deducted for each incorrect submission). However, in its current implementation, this seems to be a completely counterproductive tool.

I hope that somebody out there, who has used this in their courses, will get in touch and offer some ideas/thoughts/gripes/opinions. If you are from the Columbia math department and want to tell me why I am completely wrong about this, lunch is on me.

I don't have login to the system, so if any undergrads currently enrolled in classes that use Webwork will graciously send me some screenshots - that would be just swell.