Greg B.

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.