Convince your students to ALWAYS use the “Preview My Answers” button. This will save them (and you) a lot of trouble.
No matter what you tell them, if you give your students unlimited attempts on each problem, some of them will resort to guessing instead of (or before) thinking.
Convince your students to visit the
Student Information section of this wiki; there is plenty of useful information for them there.
Careful when selecting new problems from the library:
Occasionally, the answers are just wrong.
Occasionally the answers are right for some students and wrong for others, depending on random parameters. For example, the parity of a parameter may change the behavior of the problem.
Sometimes the problem is fine but requires techniques not yet covered.
Common issues that can arise when Webwork checks answers:
Fractional powers of negative numbers can cause errors, since Webwork computes fractional powers using logarithms.
Problems involving implicit differentiation can be incorrectly marked as wrong: if the final answer is to be written in terms of both x and y, Webwork will usually check simply whether the student's answer matches the correct answer as a function of x and y; however there is sometimes another way to write the correct answer using the implicit relation between x and y.
Workaround: Pick a set of points which satisfy the original implicit equation and use the “test_points” parameter in fun_cmp to force Webwork to only compare the two derivatives on those points. See
http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/FormulaTestPoints for details.
Students will email you far more often then they would were you not using Webwork. Many will email to ask for help with particular problems since Webwork makes this convenient for them. Others will email to tell you Webwork must be making a mistake because it tells them they are wrong although they know they are correct. Find a way to deal with this.
Remember, Webwork does not replace you or your office hours; it is (usually) not a tool to teach your students. Rather, it is a feedback mechanism for your students. Webwork lets them immediately diagnose what they are and are not understanding; these gaps in understanding must be filled the old-fashioned way (e.g., during office hours). Webwork also allows you, the instructor, to gauge precisely what your students are and are not understanding; take advantage of the “Statistics” and “Student Progress” features.