My Lab & Mastering is a computer program designed by Pearson that has been implemented into almost all math and science courses for higher education. This online program is usually required by professors to purchase along with the Pearson textbook for the class. My Lab & Mastering's primary function is to assign and help students with homework and to provide an "e-textbook". While the concept for an online source for students to read their textbook, do homework and receive tutoring is attractive, My Lab & Mastering is horribly flawed and only causes more stress upon students who are forced to deal with this program (many teachers base students' actual grades upon their success on the Pearson homework). To begin, the e-textbook is not designed well. Students cannot have more than one internet tab open of the textbook at a time so "flipping" through the textbook is impossible. Many students would also agree that while having your textbook available on your laptop or computer may be handy, an e-textbook will never surpass the capabilities of a physical copy (however, if students want a physical copy, they will have to shell out another hundred dollars). The biggest problem, however, is the online homework. First, it should be said that this is not a petition against homework. Every student knows the responsibilities of taking a college course - many hours of studying and doing assignments; however, Pearson's assignments are tedious, lengthy, and unhelpful to the learning of the student. The way the homework works (from the student's perspective) is the teacher will "unlock" sections of homework for students to complete. A teacher may open up two to five sections at a time for the students to complete within a deadline (usually about a week). Within each section are then anywhere between ten to fifty questions, and then within each question there could be anywhere between one to twenty or so parts to each question. (These numbers are averages taken from many students' personal experiences with My Lab & Mastering.) As one could deduce from these numbers, that is potentially a lot of homework. One might argue, "So what? It's college, you should be doing your homework!". This is absolutely true, but the immense amount of homework is tedious and not helpful to a student trying to learn a subject. Most students just feel like they need to "get through" the homework so they do not receive a bad grade, so they begrudgingly set aside long hours to do the same problems over and over while learning nothing. Additionally, Pearson does not provide adequate help with homework problems. If a student doesn't understand a problem they may choose the "Help Me Solve This" task within the homework; but, this only breaks the problem down into smaller, more annoying parts, and if the student cannot answer those questions then Pearson will simply just give the answer with no explanation as to how they got the answer and have the student move on to the next part. This is only teaching our students that if they cannot figure something out, just keep failing at it and someone will offer you the answer. It is a mystery how such an abomination has made its way into every math and science course and tainted the education for millions of college students, but we can change that. Make our colleges and universities fight back against these passive curriculums, and ban this program from being used in classrooms. Bring back an active learning style to our schools so our children can grow up and learn to think and solve problems for themselves - not let some computer give them the answers.