WebAssign

WebAssign was one of the earliest online homework platforms in higher education, founded at North Carolina State University in 1997 by a physics professor who wanted a way to assign and auto-grade physics problems at scale. Cengage acquired WebAssign in 2011, integrating it with the publisher's textbook content to create a package where the digital homework platform and the course textbook are bundled together — an approach that became standard in STEM courses at thousands of colleges and universities. Students pay for WebAssign access through a course access code, often as a required course material purchase.

The platform auto-grades numerical, symbolic, and multiple-choice answers for courses in physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and statistics, with algorithmic problem generation that gives each student a slightly different version of the same problem to reduce answer-sharing. LMS integration through LTI allows instructors to link WebAssign assignments to Blackboard, Canvas, or Moodle, with grade passback sending completed assignment scores to the LMS grade book automatically. The platform is particularly heavily loaded during the 24-hour window before homework deadlines, when a significant fraction of the enrolled class submits simultaneously.

When WebAssign has problems, the academic consequences for students can be direct and measurable. The platform fails to load assignment pages, presenting students with server errors rather than the homework they needed to submit. Answer submissions return errors after students have worked through multi-step problems, leaving their work unrecorded. The LMS grade passback fails, meaning completed assignments show as missing in Canvas or Blackboard even after successful submission in WebAssign. Time extension accommodations configured by instructors fail to apply correctly during platform instability, potentially affecting students with documented academic accommodations. The eTextbook integrated into WebAssign becomes inaccessible when the content delivery layer is degraded.

Outage.gg tracks WebAssign platform status using real-time community reports from students and instructors. If assignments are not loading, submissions are failing, or grades are not syncing, the live status page shows current impact.