What follows is a fictionalized version of real events. Many defenseless students were hurt in the making of this blogpost.
Have you ever been in a math course where the instructor chose to use Pearson's MyLab Math for online homework submission? If not, consider yourself lucky. If so… I can only hope that you have healed since that injurious experience. The list of things that are wrong with this terrible website just grows every time I have to touch it.
For starters, trying to just create an account so that you can get access to this piece of trash is already a tortuous nightmare. It usually takes about an hour of wasted classtime until someone realizes that it won't work unless you completely disable your adblock. Just enabling ads for the Pearson site is not enough. Honestly, it's more convenient to use a separate browser. I guess they do warn you about this, but why the hell can't they make a site that doesn't require users to mess with their extensions? I don't think I could even intentionally replicate the Kafkaesque mess that they have somehow blundered their way into unleashing upon the world. It is outright difficult to make software that sucks this much. For this, I must commend the developers at Pearson; they have truly raised the bar when it comes to wasting your time. I wonder how much human life they've destroyed with their wretched creations.
Once you've found your way to the course homepage, the nightmare really begins. You start your homework with bright-eyed naïveté, blissfully unaware of the horrors that you're about to experience. The nature and severity of this dreadful punishment probably depends on what course you're taking, so I'll take a moment to describe what it's like for me to do my Linear Algebra work. I'm too blinded by rage to craft a convincing narrative out of this, so you will have to get by with an unordered list of grievances:
- You can't really use tabs to navigate between fields. Pearson has somehow managed to break this feature which normally works out of the box—further proof that their organization is run by antisocial misanthropes who are hell-bent on enacting human suffering at all costs.
- Feeling stuck? No problem. There's a "Help me solve this" button at the bottom, offering hopes of guidance and consolation. Except when you click it, the problem is immediately marked as wrong, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to reverse that. Sirens go off at the Pearson headquarters as a disciplinary unit is dispatched to your home address with directions to use lethal force. At no point are you warned that any of this will happen.
- It is incredibly easy to get a question wrong if you don't input the answer in a very specific way. So if you made the utterly irresponsible choice of not being born a mind-reader, then shame on you! You buffoon. You slovenly imbecile. Your arrogance disgusts me.
And all of this is rivaled by the banality of the actual problems you're doing. You want me to manually invert a 5×5 matrix? I think my time would be better spent shoving red-hot needles up my urethra, but I'm pretty sure Pearson charges $85 for that option, so here we are.
Someone save me from this torture. I can't take much more of this.