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During the first one or two sessions, general progress is slow, as students need time to get used to the software: where to find the scores, what do the scores mean, where to click when one exercise is done, as well as to get alerted on things not to do: click on `Back' button of  the browser, repeatedly request the same exercise without solving it, etc. We did not find it necessary to make a general lecture to the students on all these technical points, as students can discover them by themselves very rapidly.

Under the condition that worksheets are activated sufficiently early to allow practicing before the sessions, student progress with reach an astonishing speed starting from the second or third week. In fact, the real student work is done before the work session, where many students work more than 3 hours to prepare for each 90-minute session. At the end of the semester, several student accounts accumulate a register of several thousand solved exercise units (here one exercise unit refers to one item in a worksheet).

And the work session becomes partly a real-life game for these students. Competitions for the first place will often occur among the top.

Discussions and mutual helps among students are very active. Often an explanation the teacher gives to one student quickly propagates to his/her neighbors.

Our current estimation is that a WIMS worksheet for 1 hour should contain a workload equivalent to 2 to 3 hours of work in conventional classrooms. We have had several worksheets prepared by teachers according to their teaching experience in conventional classrooms, multiplied by a factor of around 1.3. These worksheets all turn out to be dramatically too easy, to the point that students openly voice their insatisfaction.

To this difference in workload, one should add the facts that these worksheets are set with a fairely high difficulty level, and that students work out solutions themselves under WIMS, while in conventional teaching, it is often the teacher who explains the solutions to the students. Despite all these, students usually get a higher score under WIMS than out of a conventional course.

In fact, we are constantly facing a dilemma while setting up worksheets: according to student scores, both the difficulty level and the workload should be increased. While with respect to conventional courses, these are already in a very high level.

The archives show an evolution of student behavior from year to year, students becoming more and more active. In fact, for the first year when WIMS is introduced in teaching (1998-1999), off-session activities were negligeable with respect to in-session activities. While in a very recent course, off-session activities amount to roughly 2 times of in-session activities.

We have also observed that the intensive teaching practices put a very high requirement on the quality of the exercises. Even a very deep bug occuring only for 1% of the time (degeneration) may perturbate student concentration to quite some extent, and lead to strong protests from them. As a result, exercises having been used in these teaching practices are now very close to bug-free.