Mc graw hillReviews 1,892

Overall I think the concept of Aleks is okay. But the fact that if you miss a question you have to keep trying over and over again is frustrating as a student. Especially when certain topics are hard and you have to keep doing them over and over. I don't like the fact that you can take one step forward and two steps back. I think that if you get a question right it should stay instead of being erased by mistake mistake. That doesn't actually happen in the real world. I wish professors would listen to their students about what website to use.

Aleks is the worst site imaginable. Wanna do a knowledge check that lasts for 2 hours! Every problem you get wrong in the knowledge check will add up and you have to redo them in order to get to your actual HW assignment. I had to go through 54 questions that I had already done the last month so I can actually do my HW that was assigned to me. This site is trash and I wouldn't recommend any teacher using it. Teachers that use this site are lazy and don't want to actually teach their students.

You stroll back to your dormitory room after a long, hard day of work. Now that the shift is complete, you can focus on your college coursework. There is a single assignment on the page. Aleks. Ten points. Due 11:59 PM. You come face to face with a question. Since the teacher of the course doesn't teach, you do your best to answer the question. You miss it, no harm done. The little red mark appears above the question, informing you that you were, in fact, not correct. You scroll down to the explanation section, seeking the truth. However, you are shocked to see that there isn't any. There is no explanation. You repeat this process several times, but soon come to know that it is a fruitless effort. One hour has passed. It is now 9:00 PM. You look to an external site, hoping to discover how the question works. You slowly learn the material from the god-king Salman Khan. You feel ready to once again take on the problem. You put all your work and skill into this answer, triple check it. Your formatting is wrong. The red mark has returned. It is now 10:00 PM. You try again, this time accommodating for the formatting. The question submits, and it is green. Correct. Accepted. Finally, progress has been achieved. You load up the next question. You submit the question. The red mark appears once more. Taunting you, jeering at you from its high seat. What is this? The progress bar has been reset. You realize that you included the wrong amount of significant figures. One decimal place off. You fix this and submit again. The progress bar regains the green you had lost. This way, you fight through each problem. One step forward, two steps back. The physically, and spiritually exhausting trials of Hercules and the combat of wits undertaken by Sun Wukong with the gods themselves flow through your mind as you feel a sense of kinship with their plight. It is now 11:00 PM. You ready your index finger, strained and battle-hardened after the experiences you endured. You hit submit. The progress bar rolls over to full. Your very soul lets out a sigh of relief as your triumph rings through the core of your being. You look to the screen to see the fruits of your labor. One topic completed. Eleven topics remaining.

My college trigonometry teacher makes us use this thing. Of all the things you could force students to use, WHY ALEKS? You get ANY portion of a question wrong, it will take away a point and eventually force you to essentially start from scratch if you keep getting stuff wrong (with questions that feel harder than the rest). Also, if you get the same question wrong twice, it gives you an "explanation" (you have no choice against this for personal experience) for why the answer is whatever it is, which likely won't help because 1) they sometimes (almost always, my bad) are not very well explained 2) are not going to get through the minds of enraged students trying to get past a portion. I spent a literal hour trying to figure out a SINGLE subject out of a bunch that are due in a single day and I don't even know what I'm doing. For god's sake even youtube videos are a million times more helpful then the aleks "tries" to be. If you want something that actually helps and engourages students to learn something, this is most certainly, SWEAR TO GOD, not the thing you should be doing. I feel like I wasted 60 dollars for nothing. I had to "cheat" with online calculators after the professor stated not to do so. What else am I supposed to do, after all? Anyone that says that this is supposed to help a student, I don't CARE who they are, they need to seek some help themselves. I'm ridiculously upset at the world.

The absolute biggest issue is the fact that I can put the right answer in but I'm marked wrong anyway. It happens every single time I do math. This program is not about teaching students it's about producing test scores. There's no actual absorption happening. I've had 4 Aleks math programs now in college and they are awful. The explanations are not helpful, the textbook is atrocious, and the teachers get away with doing the least amount of work possible. It's a horrible horrible horrible program. If I could opt out and take a regular math class I would but my school ONLY uses aleks. Not to mention you have to buy the codes and special math books for it, like why the heck is that not covered in tuition. I cannot stand paying for a service that does me no good and causing pure hatred and resentment.

Okay so, I know that a lot of people here just wanna get it shut down but it is literally not a valuable or good tool at all for students. It gives you 2-3 problems and a $#*!ty explanation as to how to do THE EXAMPLE. NOT THE PROBLEM IN GENERAL, THE EXAMPLE. So OF COURSE when we try to do OTHER PROBLEMS WITH DIFFERENT RULES ourselves, it doesn't actually work. Most of it is just guesswork. If anything, using aleks has made me more confused as to how to do certain problems than I was BEFORE I started using aleks. It would be a different story if it actually TAUGHT US, but it doesn't do anything. It shows how to do the specific problem, that's it. No formula, no tips, absolutely nothing. I 100% DO NOT recommend this for anyone who wants to actually learn math, and for any teacher that wants their students to learn.

GATech and Chemical Engineering USF. Two are still in school.
I am so fortunate to have a school system that supports our students with this program.
I do think that an instructor needs to be available and that this program should supplement instruction from a human being. I think it takes a teacher to help young folks to love the logic flow and problem-solving that math is. Bernoulli? Occam's Razor? Fibonacci?
I am concerned about the plethora of negative reviews here. I find Aleks to be the best I could hope for... expecially during CoVid. Geese we had so much to do going into online instruction overnight... Aleks helps students who cannot be in Brick and Mortar. We use this program for traditional classes and online classes.
So why do you need an instructor now that the program can teach everything?
It cannot, humans just have too many variables. Teaching must be interactive and the instructor needs to tap into the passion the student has for the course we are teaching. (Some just do not know that they love math... yet!)
Aleks is a phenomenal tool for isntruction.

As a student, I can account for those who say that this website is bad. I'm in 8th grade, and I have had to use this site for the past 2 years. Thankfully I don't have to anymore. Here is my experience; I would do about 15 minutes every other day to get one lesson done a week. We had to do 5 lessons a week, and I was struggling because of the amount of time it consumed, and how it made me very unhealthy mentally. A girl at my school even committed suicide from ALEKS. This programme is designed for review/homeschool learning, not In-School learning and requirements. I beg of you, if you are a school admin reading, to get rid of this programme, or consider other programmes instead. If you are a homeschool worker, just try to use this in moderation, or as a review. If you are a fellow student, just hold on. One day, you won't have to use this awful programme, and you will be able to enjoy your life more. You ARE worth it,

Doing Aleks is the most terrible thing for me this year. It makes me nauseated. Stay away from it. Many Alkes' explanations and concepts are very general and unclear, it skips some procedures and formula. It is a very low effective website, which pushes people to try to pass the questions not to really learn from it. I am confused about instructors in colleges if they know how students hate Aleks and ineffective with it, and why are they still using Aleks?. I was required by my instructor to finish all topics more than 100 in Aleks to have full credit, which counts for 15% of my whole points, otherwise, I received 0 credit on Aleks module although I did 98% of my Alkes, what is the point between 1% and 98%? Is there any contract or agreement between Aleks's company and some schools, I don't really know.

College student here, my teacher uses this trash. I've never been good in math, hell I failed modeling and algebra in highschool. The amount of time I have to re do lessons or waste time on stupid knowledge checks is infuriating. Not to mention ALEXS likes to play "tricks" Yeah. They'll straight up show you how to do problems, then right after give you a question with a construction they didn't discuss. I. e lets put a negative in this polynomial. I know we didn't discuss what to do if its a negative. But hey, hope you guess right or your losing progress. I hate Aleks. I DREAD having to sit through it. And the knowledge checks, are so longs and just infuriating. And if you make a mistake, it gives you additional lessons to redo! Its Awful! Avoid this awful program like the plague it is infuriating! Not in my all my years have I never spent so much time doing a single class. I spent less time in AP or even IT!

This website promotes self harm because once you get one question wrong it makes lose progress and sometimes you just have to start the whole exercise over again because of that and it will infuriate people after a while and while working on unreasonably long units that seem to never end it will cause you to spend hours working on math instead of doing work for other classes or doing something productive, and it causes you to lose your mind.

So, I'm a fifth grader who is working on fractions on this website. Though once when I was doing multiplication and it was 5x12=? So I did 60 of course and it said it was wrong, but the explanation was the same thing I did! This has happened loads of times and it SUCKS. It's a waste of your time and money. It's the reason cancer exists honestly. And what's more? I had to do a topic TWICE, TWICE! This stupid website needs to burn! OK 1 MONTH LATER, SAME PROBLEM. BURN ALEKS BURN. > :O Another time, but it gave me a high school explanation, wow.

I teach, I work with students of all ability levels, and I have to say that ALEKS is the absolute WORST program I have ever used. It is so terrible that any teacher choosing to use it for their classes should be immediately fired. It is poorly constructed, hard to use, DOES NOT TEACH STUDENTS MATERIAL IN A WAY THEY CAN RETAIN IT, and discriminates against disabled students. If you are thinking about using this program, do yourself a favor--leave the profession you are a horrible teacher with zero understanding of educational pedagogy. Absolutely worthless and made my student want to self harm.

I started using ALEKS since COVID 19 forced us to adopt distance learning. It truly is not exaggeration when you hear students AND PROFESSORS AND HS TEACHERS. It truly does not even "teach" you anything. It gives you problems on problems and when you make the TINIEST. Mistake you have to repeat your hard work and lose a lot of credits. An example of this could be forgetting to put units or even maybe rounding wrong BUT. You have the correct answer. Its just not fair. I curse whatever school adopts this stupid learning assessment tool. It ain't about learning its literally Torture. There is not a day that I log on Aleks I spend at LEAST 7-8 hours doing my College assignment. I am paying more than 80 something bucks for this torture machine. I starve myself I get headaches BECAUSE OF THIS STUPID WEBSITE. I hope the CEO gets sued. I hope they lose all their money and profits. I hope they shut down and go out of business. I wish horrible wishes for this stupid company. I cant believe anyone would really want to be a part of this company. I get so frustrated doing the work and those stupid knowledge checks are so time consuming. We got other $#*! to do with our lives than to sit on a computer screen because we made a HUMAN ERROR?!?!?!?!? Like forgetting a unit symbol. If it was in person I KNOW no teacher will fail you because you forgot such intricate detail. It is so annoying to think this is a legitimate company benefitting off tortuturing students who use their sites. I never ever feel like I am learning I ALWAYS cheat on it because it is so pathetic. I cant imagine someone who doesn't cheat and sits down to do all the assignments by hand like omg Im literally crying rn because its INSANE this site and my stupid professor really still uses this site to assign HW and mandates it to be 10% of our overall grade. I hate this when I get older I am definitely suing and spreading more awareness and drag this stupid company down. If you are reading this you are NOT stupid.