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Grades Used: College
This is a solid, well-constructed learning platform. It was mandated by my school for remedial algebra (required for Math 111), and I was skeptical that it would be as helpful to me as a teacher. I was pleasantly surprised.
In each lesson, you get a walk-through of how to work a problem. Any terms are highlighted in blue, and when clicked you get a pop-up that explains the term in-depth. Also, if there is more than one way to approach a problem, there’s a button you can click to see a pop-up with the other way(s) to work the problem.
There’s no drilling. Once you master a concept (usually by working 2-3 problems), it moves you on to the next concept. If you can’t get it, it will move you on to another concept and loop back around to the one you had trouble with.
I tried to get my middle school kiddo into this program, but the online school we go through wouldn’t allow it for credit. Bummer. It works so well!
Cons: Garbage as a tools for learning new materials, waste of time and too many other
Grades Used: College
My Chemistry professor choose this as the platform we would partly use for homework this semester. I have to say but I never hated a program to this extend but Aleks.
The program had now consumed almost the entirety of my study time, is a source of untold anger and annoyance. Some of the question lacked clarification causing mistake and the mistake was never followed up with more detailed explain other than that it just wrong. Every mistakes no matter how tiny redacted your progress and lengthen what would have been a 20-30 mins work to over an hour. Not to mention I had to date received only a few works out of many that actually do have something to do about Chemistry. I get where they are coming from but I am in here to study Chemistry specifically not to dabble in other subjects. Worst part is you can’t even skip their annoying assessment tests and those other subjects because then you can’t advance work that the class you are in requires.
I am ready to quit this class because of Aleks alone and hope that there are another Chem class that don’t requires this garbage of a program to be a part of.
Cons: Everything
Grades Used: College
There is no explanation and by far the loosest definition of “AI” present in the world its cause and effect if then statements totaling probably 5 lines in excel would complete their “AI”. They are selling a buzz word.
There is nothing to support any “Explanation” the only way to learn is to self teach with YouTube or something or bludgeon the program by identifying cause / effect from their chemistry or math problems. NO TEACHING AT ALL its a skills quantification do not expect any help form ALEKS.
Absolute garbage.
Cons: way too many.
Grades Used: 12
this is the worst website i have used for math. i’m currently a senior in high school trying to get my credit and this program has not helped one bit. i have to keep looking up answers in order to complete topics. i’m so stressed and i just want to be done with this. don’t recommend at all.
Cons: Everything
Grades Used: College Chemistry
This program is absolutely atrocious. This is not a student fresh out of high school speaking to this, but a 30 year-old full-time student that has no social life and no children. This program only teaches in the learning style for a person that is visual or read/write. There are no videos to assist with learning and the program itself is difficult to navigate. I have sat hours working on an assignment so I could just be done with this course for the day for it to come back to the home page and say there was additional work to be done. The information itself would not be that difficult to grasp if the textbook that goes hand in hand with Aleks actually taught everything that is in the homework. However, it does not and you spend hours trying to grasp a concept via other means on the internet. The only positive thing I can say about this program is you revisit the information you have already gone over, but it creates that much more homework.
Cons: Pricey, teaches nothing, explanations are all in unreadable, uncomprehendable technical jargon
Grades Used: 10
There are no helpful tutorials or videos within this course. I would have been better off just getting a textbook for my daughter and letting her fend for her self with just that and youtube– and I would have saved myself from paying such unjustifiably high subscription fees. How do you expect a child with no prior subject matter knowledge to be able to read through all of the jargon and highly technical explanations without any actual teaching through the course? This course was supposed to teach the subject; however all it really does is provide exercises and test independent knowledge. I will not be renewing my subscription, and I want you to know how disappointing and useless this course was for my child.
Cons: Difficult to progress, very pricy, and it outsources teaching done by actual teachers to a garbage program.
Grades Used: 11
The majority of reviews that one will find on ALEKS are reviews that come from the perspective of a parent of a child from grades 2 through 8. I am a high school chemistry student, and I have to use ALEKS as a large portion of my grade. From my experience with this program, I can safely say that this is the absolute worst school work I have ever had to do. On a regular basis, I will find myself scratching my head, unable to understand the terrible and long-winded instructions that come with every topic. All ALEKS does is give me more homework, adding on to the extreme amount of homework that I already have. I chose chemistry and not AP chemistry for a reason. I never thought that a class like this would give as much if not more homework than an actual AP class. It’s just so awful. I really hate ALEKS.
Cons: Cannot teach you new concepts w/o external aid
Grades Used: College
I’m using ALEKS in my first semester of college, and it has not helped me learn anything new. If I had used this as review for when I was still in highschool (I’ve been homeschooled my whole life,) I would have learned so much better – but on its own, I have failed to learn a single concept. In fact, the only concepts that have stuck with me so far are the ones I went to YouTube to understand. ALEKS teaches little and reprimands you for being wrong (even when you’re likely right.)
Many have already mentioned their ills with the program, so I’ll stick to the major one for me: the “Explanations.”
Perhaps they’re different for different courses, but for mine, the instructions for each topic only “detail” the steps they’re taking to answer the problem, rather than HOW they are answering it. What a YouTube video could explain with rationale in less than 10 minutes with different perspectives, ALEKS’s instructions take ages to crack to see the formulas underneath. It throws the same explanations at you even after multiple wrong attempts; it punishes you for being wrong, when it’s truly at fault for not being able to teach the concept properly. This gets especially frustrating when you reach complex word problems in Algebra 2 and beyond that require a genuine human to explain/write the instructions.
For reviewing what you already know though, I’m sure this would be great! Randomized questions that you can use to endlessly sharpen your skills on, in addition to a few other actually neat techniques, make it effective in going over what you’ve previously learned. But, on it’s own, it only induces anxiety for your scheduled time when you’ve gotten 2 or 3 questions wrong in a row and still have no understanding as to why, even after it lambasts you with the same minimalist white screen with text attempting to explain why you’re wrong, and failing.
It’s crippled my motivation to push forward in math, and with hundreds of dollars on the line, I am severely dissapointed in ALEKS as a learning program.
(Oh, and my personal cherry on top? My syllabus for my math course said I’m not allowed to use ANY outside matieral to learn. Maybe I misunderstood, but if that includes YouTube, I can’t see how they can, with full knowledge of how ALEKS “teaches,” expect students to succeed. Lazy gits.)
Cons: Everything that matters
Grades Used: Pre-College Algebra
Terrible experience. As far as the graphic design of the program, it’s user friendly. But other than that unimportant aspect, it’s terrible. I had 430 topics assigned to me in one semester. Each topic, you were to only do 3-5 problems, before moving you to a whole other concept altogether. I felt like I was being bounced around from square roots, to factoring, to fractions, there was no organization. It was hard to actually retain anything longer than 15 minutes considering you barely grasp it before you do something completely different. By the time 3 months rolled around and I had to think about the final test, I forgot the majority of things. They don’t throw any past learned topics back in as a refresher or anything to help retain the knowledge learned. I felt like I was being herded through the program.
Cons: So many cons.
Grades Used: 9
My dd’s charter school chose to use Aleks this year while school is held online and not in person. The private school she attended for 1st-8th used Saxon. Aleks is horrible. DD has spent hours on this math program without any significant progress and lots of tears. We are now homeschooling with Saxon.
Cons of Aleks:
1- It doesn’t actually teach anything. Some topics have videos; others do not. Often the explanation in the videos doesn’t actually match the type of problem in the practice portion.
2- If a student gets stuck, there isn’t much help available. It simply moves you on to a different type of problem.
3 – It is mastery based which sounds like a good thing except if you master a problem you still have to continue to do the same problem several times. If you don’t master a problem, you are just stuck without any options for help. So many hours spent in an endless loop.
4- Topics seem pretty random. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of thought given to the presentation of the problems — I can’t figure out if there is a sequence or a spiral.
Again, there isn’t any actual teaching here. It is a program to review concepts and practice problems. It’s also a great way for schools to save money because they can stick a whole bunch of kids on Aleks, claim they are getting math instruction, and not have to hire actual teachers. Look elsewhere if you want your kid to actually learn math.
Cons: Essentially everything about it... :(
Whoever created Aleks is responsible for wasting countless hours of students’ time and causing an incredible amount of unnecessary stress. As a student of a professor who required Aleks as a study tool, I can testify to the fact that Aleks DOES NOT help students to learn, but rather encourages students to look up answers and find short cuts in order to obtain correct answers and move forward. It can take hours to complete assignments since it you need to fill a certain number of bars before moving onto the next topics, and it removes bars every time you get an answer wrong. The answers must match the Aleks answers exactly, so if you miss a question by even a decimal point, you are automatically pushed backwards. This is incredible aggravating. My peers and I feel that we ended up wasting a ton of time doing assignments we did not learn from on this program– I would even go as far as to say it actually takes a ton of time away from the time I would have spent studying for the class because it would take so long to do. I’m always brain-dead after finishing it and I honestly don’t get anything out of it. This is definitely a tool that should no longer be used in the classroom, because if you ask any student who has had to use it, I can almost guarantee that they have nothing positive to say about it.