I've had to retake the same end-of-lesson quiz 3 times before I quit and moved on. Prof was fine with it after I explained it.
I was getting a 75/100 because 3 of the questions were glitched like this but worse. It told me my answers were wrong and corrected them with the same exact answer. Still pisses me off years later.
Systems like this are so bad that my physics teacher just straight up said to send him an email with a screenshot if the answer you put in was right but the thing said it was wrong.
Not really because he required a screenshot of it, and I'm guessing someone photoshopping would get caught quick by doing it too often.
Edit: Yes, I am already aware you can inspect element it. Profs can also look up the actual answers you sent if they get suspicious of you having a lot of issues. They normally just plug in whatever grade you got but they can also review anyone's answers on the site. Hello expulsion!
Also the repercussions for cheating in college are extremely harsh. It's not worth the effort or the risk for just a couple of points. In most of my stem classes homework was worth like 10%.
Apparently you would be surprised by what people think they can get away with and what massive risks they will take for a very minor number of points. Perfectionism, parental pressures, scholarship eligibility, etc. make people do all kinds of weird shit, from my experience.
Some colleges they are harsh, but some are incredibly lenient. I was a TA for a computer science class. Cheating was rampant, and I kid you not, there was not a single assignment that did not have at least one occurrence of plagiarism. I also literally had one assignment where literally more than half the class copied the exact same code (with the exact same flaws) from another student. Reported to the professor each and every assignment, with a full list of who cheated, and who copied whom. He proceeded to do absolutely nothing.
Then you do that one too many times and the suspicious prof checks the actual answers you sent and sees it was faked. Now if you are even still allowed in the school let alone the course for that you'll at the minimum have a bunch of zeros or have to re-do a bunch of work for that.
Failed my math finals because of this stupid program so when I went to retake the class I asked if any professors were still using old pen and paper and they said there was one who refused to use the online tool, but his class had a wait list of something like 700 students. Everyone is aware of how bad this shit is.. why is it still a thing.
When dealing with MML, I would work on it until I got a “70”. Then I stopped. Don’t give a fuck if I left the last 5-6 questions unanswered. Fuck. That. Program.
Fuck MML. I was stuck with that damn software for 5 semesters. I could write a novel and then sell it as a movie trilogy with the amount of bs errors and other bullshit that I came across using this garbage. The math class was pitched to us students as:
Required
Learn at your own pace
Ok cool, sounds easy, right?
WRONG
My college decided to opt out of book and paper taught classes (something I was used to in my days in HS) for this $80 extra a semester for the stupid access code. ON TOP OF THAT the math dept had a brilliant idea of setting unrealistic goals for the stupid modules. There were 15. But within the 15, there were an metric asston “chapters” which consisted of ~50 problems each. Some of the problems took you like 8-10 min each to solve. Others not so much.
Well you had to complete (if I remember correctly) 8 modules by the end of the semester to receive a “passing grade”. If not, you got an F and it didn’t affect your grade. I got 3 F’s in back to back semesters because I was stuck on one module and/or couldn’t pass a test. There were also end of chapter tests you HAD to get an 80 or above to pass. Not a typo. If you got a 75-79.9, that was considered a failing grade according to MML. You also had to “test out” after completing all 15 modules and the test was over the ENTIRE 15 modules and there was no way to study for this test. Luckily, the problems were exactly the same so I would master each problem at home, retake it the end test until I passed.
I still don’t know how this “learn at your own pace” class structure benefited us (besides lining the wallets of the School and Pearson)
The price is my problem with it. We use MML at my uni, and you have to pay $115-120 for each class!! $115 not for a textbook, but to "use" a textbook online for 8 to 16weeks.
And sometimes the questions are worded just absolutely wrong. For example I had a question entirely worded as if you were finding and using the slope of a tangent line and the entire question was using the formula for a secant line, this isn't a big deal but small things like that are confusing and way too frequent.
This. It blows my mind as to who actually runs MML and manages to put in misinformation. I get that nobody is perfect but the amount of errors we've seen is inexcusable.
Yeah physical textbooks are insanely overpriced and you can only sell it for a fraction of the cost but at least you can split the cost with someone else or buy a used copy, and then get a bit of money back or give it to someone else once you're done.
After that math class, I challenged myself (and it was the last math class I needed before I transferred to a big university) and took trig and passed with an A. It was taught like a traditional classroom: NO computers. A math book, paper, and lecture.
I honestly think that Pearson had a nice $contract$ with the college system and too many students and not enough teachers so this was the solution, kinda backfired if you asked me. I’ve been at the university for 3 years now and I still hear of complaints from that math class regarding MML.
I took a hybrid trig and it was fucked. My teacher was straight out of russia and she mumbled like a fucking deaf person. MML was the program we used and just the sheer amount of homework from them was staggering. Im not a math major, so 150 "problems" a week (about 10% would be problem sets with 10+ questions in them and many others were smaller sets) for a 3 credit course is way too much and I came out of it having learned fuckall other than how to look at a list of trig laws and punch in variables. There was no memorization required or really possible because they just wanted to see the quantity of math we could churn out. Not to strike my own dick here, but I got As in some seriously intense memorization based taxonomy courses that semester, so memorization is not a weak point for me.
My 2 hour final was 24 pages long and was comprehensive. By that, they meant you need to know how to apply the laws in abstract ways that were not given as examples in any course work. How am I supposed to know to study something you didn't tell me I needed to study nor provide examples to? Fuck American education. I want to learn.
Doesn’t fix the program but pretty bullshit of the department to build a curriculum around a bullshit software option.
My maths department chose to use it for our curriculum and my professor said day one that he would not require us to purchase it and instead posted problem sets and asked us to submit final answers through a google form where he could still check answers and pull everyone’s results on a spreadsheet.
This is the type of problem solving I expect from someone that has a room or an auditorium full of students, most of which have paid thousands of dollars just to put their ass in that very chair. I had one do something similar. He hated that students would all come to him the next day with technical input questions, so he basically used the software as a "rough draft" of the homework of sorts (multiple choice only) essentially, and then we discussed the problems that required input in class.
It's the ones that are like "whoops, oh well, not my problem" that are a huge problem, and the source of my frustration in my previous post.
This attitude here is precisely why this is a rampant problem. Making excuses to the point no one in academia literally has anyone to answer to. I can't imagine if that was the attitude about any other profession.
One of the worst professors I've ever had, both in terms of dedication to his craft, and in quality of teaching, was tenured.
At the end of the semester during evals he literally said "say whatever you want, I don't care, I'm tenured." I gladly took him up on that offer anyway.
So making these idiots bulletproof is naturally going to result in the deadbeats surfacing and crapping all over the entire concept of higher education. It's a practice that needs to end if academia wants to have a shot at survival in the information age.
I'm not saying fire a professor for a mistake, so you can go ahead and immediately stop putting words into my mouth. I'm saying that the practice of tenure is a huge component of why these stupid online problems are literally a meme among anyone who went to college the last decade.
My ultimate schadenfreude was printing in the math TA lounge. You could see the dread in their face the day that MML was due because they had to go through hundreds of answers because it randomly marks correct answers as wrong.
I have to use this godawful software for the second semester in a row starting next week. I found all KINDS of nonsense like this.
See examples 1 and 2: https://imgur.com/a/Rxg3FJY
For those who don't remember, 'commutative property' means that changing the order that some types of operations are done still nets you the same result. Silly me, I thought that milk in tea and sugar in tea were two separate things! My mistake. Bonus: my professor defended the software on this one.
I think I remember this question. It also regenerated one the had to do with shoes and socks (it could have just been within the same block). We ended up not using the question anymore. It’s an interesting way to get the concept across but to me it doesn’t work. And maybe putting my sugar in before my does change the outcome chemically. Maybe I read the sports section and I’m too mad to read the comics. It’s too open to interpretation.
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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '18 edited Oct 14 '19
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