honestly though, it depends on how the teacher uses it. i know for me, and everybody at my school, webassign is hell, because none of the chem teachers use any of the helpful components. we get 1 submission, no calendar of due dates and assignments, no indication of why an answer is wrong (teachers can do that w/ their webassigns), if you dont have everything phrased exactly the way your teacher phrased it, you get it wrong, regardless of the accuracy of your answer, and i rarely know when i even have a webassign. plus our teacher doesnt actually teach, so webassign=staying up til 3 each morning w/ our badly-written textbook, attempting to teach ourselves chem. not fun.

HOWEVER, if your a caring teacher who has a loooot of time on your hands, webassign can be a decent experience and easy 100. the negatives, even if you are a good teacher? cheating is made even easier, you have to be on the computer to do it (SO for people like me who dont get home from school til 9:30, it means a looooong evening), there ARE glitches, and the majority of students just really dont like it.

if you DO use it (and i advise against it), one thing: make sure you put in the answer right. there is nothing worse than spending hours trying to solve a stupid chemistry problem, w/o any idea of how to solve it, only to find out the next morning that, oh, you did have the right answer, webassign just had the wrong answer inputted, and you wasted 3 hours of your life, which resulted in you NOT finishing the stupid webassign and getting a 50. D:<

but, yes, i hate it. and my normally honest, moral self is desperately looking for someone to cheat off of because i am so sick of this stupid thing. i dont even care how immoral it is, and how it 'wont help me learn' i just want to get it done, and am currently holding that more important than actually learning. so ill probably fail my test tomorrow. :/

Webwork is pretty forgiving about the formulas it accepts. In your example about, both answers should be accepted. My understanding is that it checks if a formula is correct by evaluating the formula at a handful of points, and doing the same for the given correct answer, and comparing the values.

Mathematics online is quite different from language assignments online because Mathematics answers don’t really vary (and if they do vary, a simple substitution or other calculation can determine if two answers are equivalent). I think you would be surprised at how smart some of the online systems can be these days with symbolic variables and equivalent forms of algebraic expressions. In some questions, students may still be annoyed by leaving an empty exponent template in an answer, or having a typo in an answer, but the programs themselves are quite symbolically sophisticated; some even use Maple or Mathematica behind the scenes to perform calculations and answer evaluation.

I’d encourage you to seek out demos of the products out there and try them for yourself. As they say, seeing is believing.

(I would feel remiss if I didn’t mention that I work for MyMathLab, but Pearson also has content for its textbooks in WebAssign.)