Troubleshooting and messages
Updated 21 Feb 2023
If you don’t find the help or answer you need below, please contact Pearson Customer Support to explain your issue. Or search the Pearson Support site for answers to common questions.
Assignment issues

- You may need to accept cookies or turn off a popup blocker for Mastering in your browser. For instruction, search the Pearson Support site.
- If you receive a message when you try to play a video or open other content, please report this to your instructor. (Your instructor can then report the issue to Pearson.)
- If you and other students on the same network at school cannot submit answers, the problem may be with network security.

Consult with your instructor to check whether the answer is incorrect. If there’s a mistake in the assignment item, your instructor can raise the issue with Pearson using Mastering’s Contact the Publisher instructor feature.

As you work, answers you submit are saved. You can close Mastering and return later as long as the assignment is still available, like for a timed assignment.
Your instructor controls whether your class can rework assignment items for practice or if you can personally get an assignment reset to start over.

NVDA requires Design Science MathPlayer 4 or later for math or chemical symbols/formats (like operators, fractions, or superscripts) to be spoken. More about MathPlayer and how to get the latest version

Interactive Lab assignments have stricter system requirements than other Mastering assignments.
- Complete these on a laptop, notebook, or desktop computer, not on a tablet or phone.
- Use a recent version of Chrome or Safari. Interactive Labs are not currently supported on Firefox.
- Operating systems:
Windows — Use Windows 10 or 11 with one of the above browsers. (Do not use Windows 7, Windows Education OS, or Windows Enterprise LTSC.)
OS X — Use OS X 10.14 or higher with Safari or Chrome.
Chrome OS — Use with Chrome 63 or newer.

Use Mastering's Hints, Review, and other study features. Or ask your instructor for extra help. Answer box Help describes how to enter or draw answers, but does NOT help you to work through specific questions. Some students search Help for the list of acceptable unit abbreviations.
Access issues

If you’ve tried reentering the course ID, check with your instructor or a classmate to confirm you’ve got the correct course ID. If you still can’t get into your course, please contact Pearson Support.

Pearson eTextbook was formerly known as eText.
- If you can’t open your eTextbook for the first time: Please contact Pearson Support.
- If you’ve opened the eTextbook before but now the eTextbook is temporarily unavailable: You may be able to work with your eTextbook offline if you previously downloaded the book using the Pearson+ app for your eTextbook. (The eTextbook app is not available for Mastering direct integration courses.)
Error and other messages

For security reasons, your Mastering session times out after 5 minutes of inactivity. If you select Close, you’ll need to sign in again to continue working in Mastering.

Your submitted answer is close to being correct, but you need to fix something. See the order of evaluation guidelines.

Mastering or one of its features, like the eTextbook, is experiencing a temporary degradation or loss of service. Please try again later.

Mastering is temporarily unable to show the assignment item, likely due to a content coding error. Please contact your instructor to let them know. If this causes you to miss the assignment’s due date, ask your instructor if the due date can be extended for you.