• Mc graw hill

Mc graw hill

Is this your business?

Is this your business?

Claim your listing for free to respond to reviews, update your profile and manage your listing.

Claim Your Business
Is this your business?

Overview

Mc graw hill has a rating of 1.44 stars from 1,870 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers complaining about Mc graw hill most frequently mention knowledge checks, math class, and high school problems. Mc graw hill ranks 511th among Tutor sites.

  • Service
    378
  • Value
    390
  • Shipping
    271
  • Returns
    275
  • Quality
    394
Positive reviews (last 12 months): 11.4%
Positive
17
Neutral
2
Negative
130
171
See all photos

What reviewers want you to know

Positive highlights

No positive highlights yet

Critical highlights

  • The explanations are garbage and $#*! the knowledge checks.
  • If you want to live please do not use ALEKS or else you are a dead man.
How would you rate Mc graw hill?
Top Positive Review

“Anyone who likes ALEKS can die in a hole for all I care”

anonymoose m.
3/23/24

This piece of!@#$ needs to die in a fiery pit of hell, as well as the people who made it. The teachers who love it are being paid and none of those reveiws are real. Most of the time, it will give you an explanation, and it will be $#*!tier than a 50 year old public port-a-potty. Then it will deduct points from your points that you JUST $#*!ING EARNED! I would rather get my legs and arms chopped off, then get thrown in a pit of boiling oil, and after that, get my spinal cord get ripped out, than do another $#*!ing lesson.

Top Critical Review

“Mental torture”

Louie G.
3/10/24

This website is an absolute nightmare. It is ruining my mental health. I spend hours every day doing aleks topics. The fact that it makes you start over if you get a problem wrong makes me want to just bang my head against the wall. The explanations dont even make any sense and there is just so many topics due in such short time. My teachers are saying they care about my mental health while they are making us do this website every night. Whoever made this website burn in hell

Reviews (1,870)

Rating

Timeframe

Other

Reviews that mention popular keywords

knowledge check (264) use aleks (178) poo poo (3)
Thumbnail of user randomp8
1 review
3 helpful votes
May 9th, 2020

It isn't as bad as everyone says it is. My teacher assigned it to my class, and I thought it was good. Ignore all of the one-star folks, they probably just had a bad experience with it. My main problem wasn't the website, but the fact I had to do it for over an hour every day.

Thumbnail of user niceb1
1 review
6 helpful votes
February 21st, 2021

I like aleks. It has a cool review. Also it has a knowlege check. It sees what you learned. I like that... ITS TRASH I HATE THE KNOWLEDGE TESTS THEY ARE SUPER ANNOYING. IF YOU ARE READING THIS YOUR TRASH. AND JHATE U. - YOUR MOM

Service
Value
Shipping
Returns
Quality
Thumbnail of user tylert350
1 review
8 helpful votes
March 21st, 2023

This program is absolutely awful. I'd rather watch paint dry while trying to asphyxiate myself because of the existential dread this program brings to me and countless amounts of other students. Helen Keller herself along with a schizophrenic toddler could provide us with a much finer, flabbergasting program. This so called "Program" is the embodiment of Hell and unspeakable distress not even outclassed by the acts of Hitler and Osama Bin Laden combined together. Would not recommend to anyone less than deranged.

Tip for consumers:
someone deranged.

Products used:
none

Thumbnail of user bobj633
1 review
0 helpful votes
November 18th, 2021

During my freshmen year of college I was frightened that I'd have to take an online class. But with the explanations and feedback that Aleks gave, I was able to pass with an A. While my experiences we're superb, I do think it'll be helpful if you had some fundamental knowledge and teacher's to help when necessary. Other than that it's amazing!

Tip for consumers:
While Aleks is helpful, some bits can be confusing so having a tutor or a teacher could be a big help.

Products used:
Class

Service
Value
Quality
Thumbnail of user lenaj9
1 review
18 helpful votes
April 30th, 2019

A lot of people have left negative reviews, but I would ask teachers to give ALEKS a chance. It can be boring for students, but I think that is just because of the amount of material. ALEKS can reinforce things taught in class, and I personally like how each math topic is taught, then tested with two or three questions so the student can move on easily. It's not for everyone, but it can be a useful teaching tool.
My school assigns a certain number of topics per week or month, and this can be very stressful. It's best to use ALEKS if you want to give students an extra review, and not to teach new topics. ALEKS is a commitment for a classroom but overall beneficial

Thumbnail of user elizabeths1563
4 reviews
46 helpful votes
February 18th, 2021

I use Aleks a lot due to my math teacher assigning 10 topics a week, unless it is a shorter week, which in that case he assigns 5 topics. I think it is a great program that allows kids like me to learn at their own pace.
If you are new to a topic, it will give you an example of how to do it. If you get a question wrong, it will give you one more chance to solve it correctly, and then it will show you the answer along with and explanation.
The problems I have with it are:
1. The constant knowledge checks
It gives me a knowledge check every other week. This can become frustrating as they can take hours to complete. It also tells me that I have mastered a topic, and then one week later I am again reviewing it again.
2. The site kicking me off
Aleks basically kicks me off after a certain amount of time of me not doing anything on it. Sometimes I'll keep the tab open as a reminder that I need to get it done, and then when I finally am motivated to do it, it will make me go through the process of signing in again.
3. The examples
Lots of times the examples Aleks gives me are helpful, but there are times when they aren't. Sometimes I need to get extra help from my parents, who aren't able to help me until nighttime when I'm supposed to be doing other things. There isn't much Aleks can do about this issue, but it would be helpful if someone did something.
Sorry about the credibility level; there's not much I can do because I'm still a kid.

Thumbnail of user stanm182
1 review
0 helpful votes
October 7th, 2022

The knowledge checks are incredibly overpowered
You can complete half of the freaking class in like an hour, you just need to get good
I'm in 10th grade geometry, and I've done 237 of 524 topics in literally a week
That's half of the class completed in a week, just because of the knowledge checks!

Thumbnail of user willtaylor0803
1 review
4 helpful votes
May 29th, 2023

As a student who has used ALEKS for 3 years now, ALEKS. Is absolutely terrible. I gave this a 4-star review so that teachers looking for actual reviews would see this, so, here's an actual review.

ALEKS has caused so much pain and suffering to me and my fellow students. We hate ALEKS. I don't think we'd mind it as much if it was for extra credit, however, it's for a grade, and doing ALEKS is terrible - for 2 main reasons:
1. ALEKS does a terrible job of explaining topics. ALEKS really just gives you a formula or a vague rule and expects you to master it instantly. Unfortunately, that's not how humans learn; maybe AI, but not humans.
For me, I see many math teachers teaching things that don't matter in the real world, and that's fine. Theoretical mathematics and things that never really apply to everyday life can be really cool - but many teachers ruin it by never explaining why things work, and ALEKS doesn't either. Knowing why things happen in maths, at least for my friends and I, is very important to learning the material. I always want to know as much as I can, but ALEKS never fully explains its topics.
2. At least/especially for me, class interaction and asking questions in class is an incredibly critical part of learning. Just hearing and responding to others' stances and understandings of material is incredibly interesting, and can really affect how I think of something. With ALEKS, there is no interaction. There is a computer telling you a formula or rule, and that computer will tell you if you used that formula or rule correctly or not. There are no other stances or understanding. There is but a bright light dystopia and a suffering student. I've seen so many friends' and classmates' passion for math absolutely ruined by ALEKS and bad teachers.
Since I'm not a teacher, I don't know if it's being required by the state I live in (Ohio), but whatever body mandates and regulates this stuff should really reconsider having this as a part of student education. Every teacher that can, please, for everyone's sake, do not assign ALEKS.

And to any student suffering through ALEKS as I have, best of luck.

Service
Value
Shipping
Returns
Quality
Thumbnail of user mikailag
1 review
44 helpful votes
February 9th, 2019

I'm astonished to see people complaining about doing 5 topics a week. Teachers in my high school insist on at least 15 topics biweekly, which most people do complete. This program allows you to self teach yourself which will come in useful when attending college (if you chose to do so)... really in life overall. It is crucial to be able to examine instructions, to be able to READ and UNDERSTAND to then follow directions. I think Aleks knocks "spoon feeding" completely out of the park!

I thought I was bad at math all my life until I began using this program. It showed me that I just understand most things in math in a different way and that the way a teacher may stand and explain a problem to me isn't the only way to understand the problem. I understand that Aleks' explanations may not be the best at times (at least for me), but where responsibility comes in. I copy and paste the topic into Youtube and I get easy-to-understand explanations. Taking notes will also help immensely.

The moment I stopped complaining about Aleks was when I began excelling. This is a fine program and I suggest that you embrace it. Complaining stops growth. Learn to adapt to new situations.

Thumbnail of user fnamel2
1 review
5 helpful votes
November 2nd, 2017

We use this in school, and it's so much better than the regular class. You end up skipping about 90% of each course with the initial knowledge check, then get ahead of your class easily. You don't have to sit through lessons you already understand. I like that it adapts to what you already know.

Thumbnail of user gregb342
1 review
42 helpful votes
July 21st, 2019

ALEKS creates a learning path based on things that you know, it does this by giving you an initial knowledge test from the content that's going to be discussed and learned in your course. If you don't know the content then it will give you problem sets so that you catch up to where you need to be, is that really a bad thing? If anything it's helpful because if you just learn the content that's required, do you really understand it?
For my specific case, during the initial knowledge test I just clicked on "Do Not Know" all the way through, for my course in calculus it left me with 150 topics to learn for 8 weeks. Since I have my finals in the last week, ALEKS wants me to complete 25 topics over 7 weeks.
The reviews about ALEKS marking correct answers wrong is false comments, them reviewers are probably just really sour about forgetting to put a negative in front of their answer or rounding the the nearest tenth or hundredth and the program marked it wrong because, well, it was wrong. And honestly, when it marks my answer wrong I look at it and think the same thing, like "Well that's what I put!" but really I see my mistake because on paper I see that I briefly forgot that it was a negative or positive answer or forgot my decimal count and by rereading the problem I see that I didn't read it completely when I should have.
Sometimes I have a hard time understanding how to get to the answer that they want, but they have an explanation tab and if you don't understand that explanation they have a second explanation available. There are definitions included for math terms and it includes related terms to them terms. There is an ebook attached to it for your weekly assignments, if you read, try to understand what you don't know then there is no problems.
If you get wrong answers, then there is a problem with the understanding of the content, that's why the program will not let you continue when you don't understand the problem sets. If it did, the program would be lying and give you a grade you do not deserve.
There is a pie involved with ALEKS, it shows you what you need to know with how many topics for the course, there is also a timeline and you can use this to plan out your learning path through the week, not selecting your path but how many problems you need to do per week.
The only reason I had thought to leave a review was because I saw all the negative reviews and was in disagreement to mostly all of them. Just sounds like they want a trophy for wrong answers rather than the right answers and I hate math and I'm terrible at it.
I had gotten F's K-10 in math, had a teacher that believed more in one on one teaching my junior and senior years, this is the first time I have gotten A's in math besides my junior and senior years.
Overall, the program is easy to use and honestly not as bad as what everyone else is saying.

Thumbnail of user garthm17
1 review
18 helpful votes
January 16th, 2018

Aleks is the single most infuriating experience I have ever had. My appendicitis didn't hurt me as much as trying to navigate this god-awful Human Centipede of a program. Future philosophers will ponder not over the existence of a soul or afterlife, but if Aleks was better at killing children than the Final Solution.

Aleks is like a serial killer that dangles food every now and again into your cell just to pull it out of reach and mock you with a unique mix of venom and genuine hatred for all life.

Every time I log into Aleks, my gut sinks into my genitals like I've just accidentally scrolled past some gore on 4Chan.

I feel like a junkie waiting for that next objective completion so I can get on with my day--yet I know I'll never be truly free. I know what awaits me tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. I know that every time I get a happy graphic congratulating me, I'll be swarmed with wave after wave of condescending regressions. I know that I'll never be truly free of Aleks. The only thing that keeps me from bashing my head into my computer until the only light I see is at the end of a black tunnel is that I know Aleks will be waiting for me with a never-ending knowledge check.

But overall, the site's pretty well-constructed, and it's clear a lot of work went into it. It's very sleek and surprisingly intuitive, and I'm sure that took a lot of care and effort.

4/5

Thumbnail of user honesta9
1 review
6 helpful votes
September 26th, 2019

Anybody who uses ALEKS as a means of getting somebody beneath them, say a child or student, to do math will likely tell you that this program is heaven sent. They'll sing it's praises all day, and to be honest, they aren't entirely misguided in saying that. At it's core, the idea behind ALEKS is that it's a fantastic automated review tool for those who want the extra study practice. That's all ALEKS is really intended to be, from the looks of it. From what I know, ALEKS does that rather well. The problem lies within the students and kids that actually have to use the thing, and that's where ALEKS looses anything it may have had going for it.

As somebody who has logged in over 6 consecutive hours on this program, I can safely say that the problem with ALEKS isn't how it's designed, it's how our proffessors and teachers are using it. I'm a college student right now, but my major is foreign language, an Asian language at that, so this isn't going to be typed perfectly and there are going to be mistakes in grammer and spelling. I'm sorry. But deal with it because I believe what I have to say about this is important. Teachers: if you're going to use this program, I'm not going to stop you. If anybody tries to tell you it won't help improve math skills they either cheated or they were in one of the situations I'm currently in. To the students real quick: Math is a general education course. That means you're going to have to take it if you haven't already and you want any sort of college education despite what you may think. It doesn't matter what subject you want to go into, and nobody is going to let you get away with not taking it in college. You may not have to take a lot of math, but you'll need to take some, like it or not. I hate math. I always have. I'm also exceptionally good at avoiding things that I don't want to do that people tell me I have to do. So please believe me when I say that if you could avoid it, I wouldn't be typing this right now. However, seeing as this war between student and teacher over a stupid math review program has inspired me to share my opinion on the subject in hopes of helping the teachers of the world understand why students hate this so much. So teachers, now that I have your attention again, let's make something very clear.

Should you use ALEKS with your kids/students? Probably, yeah. It's not poorly designed and it does have some things and methods of teaching that it does incredibly well. However, you should keep the following in mind.

ALEKS is a review tool, and it should be used only as such. DO NOT use ALEKS as the primary syllabus or as the bulk of the students' experience in your class. In short, if you expect your students to do more than 4-6 hours of ALEKS a week, you're going to get students who cheat the system, despise your class, grow to dislike the program itself, and who fail. Yes, fail. If it isn't your class, it's one of the others. That's because the amount of time a student spends on homework a day is not going to be the majority of the student's day. They aren't going to give schoolwork any more than 1-3 hours per day, because in order to balance out daily life alongside the amount of time they spend at school, they're going to be doing other things. Asking them to do otherwise is only going to lead to students who don't believe you care about them or their well being, and in turn will shy away from coming to you if they require assistance, which isn't what you want. In college, students understand that they need to devote more time to schoolwork, but they also spend less time physically in class on average, and are more mature. In addition, those hours devoted to homework are usually devoted to all of the classes they have, not just yours. That means if all of their time is spent in ALEKS, a program which directly requires certain regulated amounts of time spent working in the program, they aren't going to do anything for any other classes, and they are going to fail as a result. I'm not saying that all students do this, just most of them. Thing is though, the prodigy is going to spend more time in ALEKS regardless, and not everyone is going to enjoy working on the program. Out of respect for the people in your class, notice I said people not pupils because they are in fact people with lives and families outside of impressionable minds, you should make things a little less strenuous on those poor souls who would rather not be taking a math class. I understand your perspective, but to a High School kid, it might not be so apparent what it is you're trying to do to help them, so if you want to teach them math, you're going to have to also get them to put down the wall of math hatred, and that requires them to know you aren't a being of pure evil that exists solely to force them to do math on a computer for 16 hours a week.

ALEKS is not inherantly evil, neither is math itself. But delagating homework and all other schoolwork to a robot that requires more time than actual knowledge and lacks the human ability to help properly correct mistakes and award them for the time and effort they put into it simply isn't going to help anybody. If you're going to use this, do it responsibly. Thank you for your time and patience. The students of the world thank you for not using ALEKS to stress us out and instead using it to build us up.

Thumbnail of user timothyh2
20 reviews
81 helpful votes
January 18th, 2011

Have you ever wanted to brush up on your HS math skills? Did you want to take a test in mathematics and need a refresher. This is an alternative you might like. For about 20 bucks a month, you can take online quizzes and progressive labs that are personalized to your needs. While it's not perfect, it is a decent alternative to heading out to adult school, no? Yes.

Sitejabber for Business

Gain trust and grow your business with customer reviews.

About the business

Provides a complete web based educational environment for K-12 and Higher-Education mathematics, accounting, statistics, and chemistry.

How do I know I can trust these reviews about Mc graw hill?

  • Sitejabber’s sole mission is to increase online transparency for buyers and businesses
  • Sitejabber has helped over 200M buyers make better purchasing decisions online
  • Suspicious reviews are flagged by our algorithms, moderators, and community members
Have a question about Mc graw hill?

Is this your business?

Claim your listing for free to respond to reviews, update your profile and manage your listing.

Claim Your Business