The classes that we offer feature online homework, some of which is machine-graded. The parser tries as hard as it can to understand what students submit, even if they use a made-up pidgin of plain text and LaTeX. The humans try as hard as they can to make sure that the problems are correct. And some of the problems have dynamic hints: If you submit a wrong answer that we anticipated, then the problem give targeted advice.

Of the thousands and thousands of students who take our classes, only a small fraction of them submit bug reports. And I can only conclude that some of the bug-reporting students do not read. Or perhaps they have lived their entire lives in a world where Google search can tell what you meant, and they can not fathom an environment in which one must make submissions in a specific form.

One problem asked the students to find the smallest positive integer not relatively prime to some particular value and that also satisfied some other condition. Many students submit a number that is relatively prime to that value and then complain that their answer is marked wrong. Even after a modal pops up reminding them that they are looking for a number that is not relatively prime to that value.

Others have a lot of trouble with mathematical notation. The order of operations is deadly. They have trouble understanding the difference between 1/2x and 1/(2x).

And then there are the parents. It is always awkward when a parent submits a bug report via the student’s account asserting that the parent has an advanced degree in a STEM field from a prestigious university. And the parent has made a sign error. Appeal to authority does not change sign errors. Sign errors come for everyone.

And sometimes a student has something embarrassing in their computer clipboard and accidentally pastes it into the homework system and submits it as an answer. For example, think about the sorts of search terms that might be on the mind of a middle schooler. We’ve seen these submitted as homework responses. These students are very eager to have a site administrator reset the problem before their parents check their homework.

But my favorite bug report of the year came in response to a straightforward word problem about fraction arithmetic.

The student’s complaint: “its not lit enough”.