WebAssign is one of the worst things to happen in educational history. Technology often enhances our learning experience: This is not the case with WebAssign.

Homework used to consist of writing down your assigned work and handing it in for a human being (one who is paid to educate) to look over and assess your understanding of the material. An unfortunate majority of colleges have turned to using WebAssign for their homework, especially in math and math-based classes. 

Since the adoption of WebAssign, homework has become less about understanding and reviewing materials covered in class, or materials that need to be learned, and more about trying to please a severely flawed online program. Any student who has taken a course that required them to do WebAssign homework can tell you what a pain the following are:

1. Submitting a correct answer that isn't formatted exactly how WebAssign wants it to be. Many of the desired submission formats go against intuition and take a lot of time to figure out how it wants it to be submitted. Often at times questions have to be left unanswered and left for the teacher to review, which is a major waste of time.
2. Waiting for the page to refresh after *every* time a submit or save button is pressed. With over 30 questions on a homework assignment, this time can easily add up to over 10-15 minutes of waiting on WebAssigns pathetic website to load. This has been the case on many networks, and it means that they simply cannot handle the amount of traffic they have, or have a very poorly made website that loads everything extremely slowly. Time is our most valuable resource, and it is poorly wasted on WebAssign.
3. Dealing with problems where a question is asked and a formula is not given. This happens constantly on WebAssign, where they try to give students "critical thinking" applications of topics they've learned. Here is one example where WebAssign expects the student to know the formula for earthquake magnitude... http://tinyurl.com/waeqmag
4. Having to navigate through the lengthy menus provided on the side of the page for certain problems. For example, having to find pi, a symbol constantly written in math homework, over and over again, where a simple pencil stroke that would take a third of a second could do the same job. This is yet another waste of irreplaceable time.
5. Trying to use the horrendous online WebAssign textbooks that you have to buy for many courses. You cannot scroll down pages using a scroll wheel or a trackpad -- you have to drag down the scroll bar, which is clunky. Many students cannot afford to buy the online textbook, which is utterly useless, and a paperback edition.

The overall issue with WebAssign is that it is a product that is seriously lacking in even the most basic features and is almost unusable for many things. It is impractical, a waste of money, and most importantly: a waste of time. Forcing students to use this terrible technology is comparable to every satirical rendition of... this exact situation! Technology should absolutely be used in situations where it is well-developed and will provide a better experience. Taking into the account all of the time-pits mentioned (not including those that haven't been), it is clear that a disturbing amount of precious time is wasted over the years when using WebAssign. 

Please help fix higher education by signing this petition to get rid of one of the worst problems in education today. This is a problem you can fix without having to spend a penny!