Dr. Lavon Page, N.C. State University, Professor of Mathematics

• Immediate grading of all student submissions (providing instant student feedback. Teacher control over level of feedback, from no feedback to complete answer key.)
• Ease of sharing questions between teachers (searchable database of questions)
• Ease of sharing assignments between teachers (searchable database of assignments)
• Ease of porting questions and assignments from one semester to the next
• Easy duplication and modification of questions and assignments (simply "duplicate" an assignment and change the parameters as needed)
• Portability of questions across computing platforms and browsers
• Ability to handle all standard HTML tags within questions
• Randomization internal to questions (so that each student can be delivered a different version of the question)
• Integration with WRAP for access control
• Ability to extend due dates on assignments for a single student, or to set different due dates for as many students as you want
• Teacher control over number of submissions allowed
• Teacher control over point values of questions
• Quick teacher access to all student submissions (critical for providing help to students)
• Easy download of student scores as spreadsheet (I don't even keep a grade book or class roll. WebAssign does it for me.)
• Provides detailed record of all student work (time stamp on every download and submission)
• Ability to interpret mathematical expressions within answers (parsing of mathematical expressions)
• Large variety of question types available (multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank with user-specified list of answers that will be counted as correct, numerical with user-specified tolerance for error, mathematical expression, multiple choice with popup menu)
• Ability of servers to support sporadic heavy loads
• Ability of servers to support massive databases (As indicated in my presentation, the number of answers to questions for my classes alone runs into the millions each semester. Every answer submitted for every question is retrievable by both student and teacher.)
• Linkage to Wolfware for maintaining class rolls (WebAssign picks up class rolls from Wolfware)
• Ability to control which students in a class see an assignment
• Ability to restrict access to assignments by IP number (so that students can be required to be in a specific room in order to have access to a test, for example)
• Ability to restrict access to assignments via password
• Administrative access available (we use this, for example, to resolve particularly thorny issues or to provide WebAssign services to others in the department who don't want to be bothered with setting up their own assignments)
• Extraordinary reliability -- I have found WebAssign to be more reliable (in terms of "down time") than other NCSU tools such as WebCT, Real Server, e-mail, etc. And on the rare occasions when problems do occur, the "fix" at WebAssign is usually quicker than the "fix" implemented for other tools.