Staff Writer Lisa and Deputy Editor Sam issue some very valid complaints about the worst platform ever made.

If you’ve ever taken physics at Barnumbia, you’ve likely been subjected to the economic and psychological torture device that is WileyPlus. We’re here today as former mechanics students, and one current E&M student, to air out our grievances with the demonic platform.

  1. It costs SO MUCH FUCKING MONEY.

The minimum one can spend on WileyPlus is $70 per semester, meaning if you’re a good student like Sam (not like Lisa) you end up spending upwards of $140 to have it for just a school year. There’s no way to skirt this with online PDFs or pirating either, as the website serves as both a textbook and as an extra, worse version of Canvas (because it’s owned by the same company). This would maybe be worthwhile for a useful pedagogical tool, but as you will see below you’d actually be better off flushing 7 $20 bills down the drain.

  1. The idiot computer doesn’t understand rounding error.

WileyPlus pretends to be gracious by allowing a margin for error in your response—plus or minus 1 sig figs, or something like that. However, many a time in mechanics, we fell victim to typing in an answer just outside of this range on our final attempt, and receiving no credit because the machine can’t understand that using 9.81 for gravity is essentially the same as using 9.8. 

  1. You get a limited number of attempts and no feedback between them.

In mechanics, our evil overlord (professor) gave us five attempts per problem on WileyPlus. Sam now bravely faces only three attempts under their more malevolent dictator. These attempts will tell you you’re wrong, and whether the problem is your units or your answer (it’s always your answer), but not provide any suggestions as to where you might be going wrong, because again, THE IDIOT MACHINE DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING. Therefore you have to face the Squid-Games-like pressure of knowing you’re running out of attempts to receive anything more than 0.75/5 points on this problem you’ve worked on for hours but without any means of improving your answer before your opportunities are out.

  1. In fact, you get no feedback at all, and no partial credit.

This is the heart of the issue with WileyPlus—all of your physics learning for the week is meant to be typed into a tiny box and rounded correctly in order for you to deserve any sort of decent grade. No work shown, and thus no feedback on your mistakes, and no partial credit. You could be making the same initial mistake on every homework and never know because no human being ever looks at it and tells you where you’re going wrong! Worse, that mistake could be something small like an arithmetic error, with all the concepts still correct, and it would be the same as if you’d been sleeping through every class. It occurred to us multiple times that one could put in a poorly-rounded answer that one worked on four hours in for your last attempt at a WileyPlus problem, and you’d get the exact same results grade-wise as if you typed in a random number for every attempt. 

  1. And when it does give you answers, they can be wrong!

While studying for the mechanics final we came across multiple ‘solutions’ that eventually arrived at the correct answer, but suggested preposterous starts to the problem that would not lead to that answer. One example included suggesting one start the problem with 0 kinetic energy when the problem stated an insanely high initial velocity (pictured above). Additionally, in the useless multiple-choice exam-prep modules, many ‘wrong’ answers were mistyped but also objectively correct, such as the below:

Why is this wrong? They both terms from physics!!!

Oh WileyPlus, how we despise you.

WileyPlus leading us astray via Author