Teachers have ditched the old routine of passing assignments in on paper and some are now requiring them to be submitted online.

Many LHS teachers are asking students to use schoology.com and turnitin.com for their students to submit homework and to recieve their assignments.

This is an issue because not all students have access to a computer. Even if they have a cell phone, they might have bad service when they are in the school. Since they can’t get online, their grades might suffer and that’s unfair since it isn’t their fault that everything is online now.

There has been a time when I couldn’t get online for my assignment and it resulted in me receiving a zero. Also just recently this year, I had to submit a paper on turnitin.com and it wasn’t working for me on my laptop at home or at school.

This resulted in me panicking all day since it was for an honors class and I thought my grade would suffer tremendously. I did get it in on time but that was because I had spoken to my teacher beforehand and he was understanding of the situation, but not all teachers are.

I have overheard a story about a student who did not have access to a computer so she wrote out the assignment. The teacher was angry about it, saying “You can’t keep doing this,” as if it was her fault that she doesn’t have the technology.

Teachers occasionally do give students access to the computer lab or Chromebooks, but normally it’s one class period and sometimes the assignment can take longer to be done. Also, a student might not have the time to get to a computer lab or grab a Chromebook in the morning from the library. This is either due to a full schedule of classes or they take a bus in the morning, leaving them with a small amount of time just to get to their lockers and to their first class.

Not only are students having a hard time with getting their assignments in, there’s also issues with the sites. For example, a student had submitted a college essay on turnitin and it said she had plagiarized by 5%. It was a personal essay and turnitin cited that she plagiarized from blogs.

She shouldn’t get punished because a site said that extremely common words are being plagiarized. As a result she had points taken off of the grade of her essay.

Teachers should make it an option to submit assignments online instead of a requirement or at least be more understanding about it. Also, they should tell their students what the assignment is instead of them having to go online to find out.