Monday, February 19, 2007

McGraw-Hill's Homework Manager is a cunt

I'm taking my last required account class this semester. Our professor requires that we do our homework online using McGraw-Hill's Homework Manager. For very simple home assignments (especially things like matching and some basic journalization of transactions) it's pretty slick. Beyond that, it blows.

We did not have class this past week because of Wednesday's snow storm; our professor sent an email and told us that the due date for this homework assignment was extended another week.

Vaguely remembering this email, I came home tonight a little after 9:30pm and checked homework manager to be sure the due date wasn't midnight tonight (like it always is). Sure enough, it said assignment three was due at midnight.

I spent the next two hours rushing through the assignment to make sure it was in on time. Keep in mind that my book and my notes are at the office, and I'm trying to do this from home.

I finished with less than five minutes to spare, and my grade comes back a 74%. Considering there's a chapter of material we didn't cover, I thought this was actually pretty good. Then I looked at the side-by-side of my results and the correct answers and realized why I lost so many points:
  • I denoted negative amounts in parens ($1000), which is a convention in accounting, instead of with a negative [-$1000] sign
  • I miscalculated formulas I have not yet learned (that I dug up on the Internet(s))
  • I left three digits after the decimal instead of two (more precise == more wronger), and
  • in a five part question where everything was done in order, I did not going back twice to earlier parts of the answer and update the T-Accounts in part one with changes that happened in parts three and four (which the instructions never told me to do, and makes no fucking sense)

I emailed a nastygram to my professor and told her I was not amused that I rushed through that and spent two hours to get a 74% when it wasn't even due. I should be able to redo the homework for a higher grade (we typically get two chances) once she fixes homework manager, but clearly it's going to take at least an hour to redo since it has about a million fucking parts to it.

What a fucking donkey show this class is turning out to be.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Glad to see I'm not the only one pissed off by this program, and the teacher's inability to use the homework manager properly.