With the rise of technology, teachers have been taking advantage of new resources and assigning more and more online homework. After all, why not? There’s automatic grading, nifty online practice tests, and no messy handwriting to decipher. However, online homework has more negative points to it for the students, which leads to a harder time learning or just not doing the homework altogether.

Often, when doing nothing in class, students will pull out homework assigned earlier in the day. This can take care of a large part of their workload and help reduce stress for those in sports or AP classes. It also isn’t possible with online homework. Students are not allowed to just pull out a laptop and start working. Instead, a reality commonly found in math classrooms is that the student to finish math homework first then moves to the one student computer for other homework, while the rest settle with playing cards for lack of anything productive to do. Homework then builds up until the end of the day, when there’s still sports practice or a long ride home, leaving a mountain of work that might otherwise have been dealt with at school.

Besides this time-management nightmare, there are inherent issues with computers. As student Austin Mitchell said, “Online homework is prone to technological issues and falls apart if students don’t have internet access, which are both issues that paper and pencil do not have.”

The internet isn’t always reliable. There are days it just randomly doesn’t work, as often experienced at school. The sites used often don’t work well with older computers, a problem that is accelerating with the development of technology. Then there’s the homework sites themselves. They can malfunction and glitch until all progress is lost and the user is reduced to knocking their head against the keyboard in despair.

Once you take these into account, it is clear that teachers should not assign online homework anymore unless there is specific class time and computers devoted to this homework. Continuing to inflict the student body with online homework can only lead to a harder time learning, completing coursework, and lowering student mental health.