Mc graw hillReviews 1,887

There is a section of hell reserved for all the people who have made school as miserable as it is. That includes shakespeare, mean overweight PE teachers with orange spray tans, and the creator of aleks. I will watch and laugh from above as shakespeare is forced to read his own work for eternity and suffer like all high school students in english class. The PE teachers will be forced to run the pacer test for the rest of time. And the greatest sinner of all, the creator of aleks, will be damned to repeat topics on his dumbass, faulty program for eternity. Like prometheus, his liver will be slowly eaten by vultures, but instead of vultures it's aleks and instead of his liver it's his brain. Although i'm not certain he has one, considering how badly his $#*!ty $#*! program is made. Half the time it marks you wrong and instead, it's the one that's $#*!ing wrong. I didn't know a program was capable of gaslighting, manipulating, and degrading me until i encountered aleks. If you're a math teacher thinking about using this program, don't. Please. Every day as i completed topics, i hoped a terminal illness would kill me so i didn't have to look at the Pi Chart Of Failure And Misery ever again. I would rather jump out of a window and impale myself on a pike than suffer through the hours it takes to finish a topic on aleks again.

It seems that every teacher that goes with Aleks acts like an entitled brat. She yells at me for "Not turning in work" when I spent an actual hour and 30 minutes doing the $#*!ing knowledge check and didn't even finish it. I can't even motivate myself to try and actually put an ounce of my attention towards it. I just do at least 5 minutes of a question, then something actually fun for a significantly longer amount of time.

Aleks itself is actually a really $#*!ty website. The UI sucks with it's boring white background and only a square of the screen is taken up by the actual problem. I made a whole favorites folder filled with websites just to cheat on the damn thing since I can't care about actually putting effort into it. The knowledge exams are a waste of time and punish you for not knowing a subject. And then the actual topic questions are a garbage waste of time, they just constantly punish you and give $#*! explanations. I only learnt how to calculate the circumference of a circle by figuring out the pattern with trial and error, the explanations never told me how calculating the actual are of the circle worked except with 1 example of the RANGE and not the DIAMETER. Aleks fails as a math website, and I'd guess it's only being used since schools are getting paid by Aleks

This mathematic student help thing, is terrible, It doesn't even have correct answers. Parents you kids will be so annoyed.

Before Aleks was in my school my teacher was so helpful. She used to show us how to do it and would sit there with us for the whole class if needed. But when my school got Aleks it changed. She went from helpful to unhelpful in a week. If you asked for help she would just say "look at the examples". I used to be excited about math class. She does not help and Aleks does not either. The "examples' are Sh*t. They make no sense and most times when I am stuck the thing I am stuck on is not even on the examples. I just want them to change their examples and make them easier to understand.

EXTENSION OF TITLE: the torture that is ALEKS. I foolishly spent my hard-earned money on this for a class and oh boy do I regret it. You are not allowed to progress, unless you get all of the points. The catch is that if you miss a question, then you, instead, regress. This leads you to spend more time than previously anticipated on the questions. Doing 3 different topics with an estimated 3-4 questions each can turn into 3 hours of stress rather than at most, one hour. If I could go back in time and have a talk with its creator, I would yell vulgarities at them so that this abomination would have never been birthed from their genitalia and/or rectum.

1. Punishing students for missing a problem (or making simple mistake) doesn't make students want to study to get the problem right next time, it causes them to cheat because that's the fastest/easiest way to avoid punishment. It's basic psych?
2. Reading text and looking at examples does not equal teaching. If these "explanations" weren't so convoluted, then students would perhaps be inclined to learn, instead of cheat.
3. Inconsistent- there is no way to see which "topic" number you are on without exiting. That doesn't even matter, as some topics don't seem to go towards your weekly goal: I had 6 to do in one day, and these "filler topics" caused me to have to do 20.
4. Not sure why, but this is genuinely harmful/dangerous towards people with anger issues, mental illness, etc. There are multiple reports of s/h & frustration (breaking things, etc). Hell, I'm crying 30 minutes into my topics each day. There is something about the site that is just mind-numbing and makes you feel like utter s**t.
5. The mind numbing definitely works; I immediately forget everything that I've learned. Once a knowledge check shows up, I know I'm screwed. There is no way for students to retain information if it's not actually explained in a meaningful way.
6. Knowledge checks. Dear god. You are tested on completely random topics, past and future. If you miss a single question, you are forced to do extra work & cannot progress in your actual classwork.
7. This is supposed to be a "replacement for teachers and classes", yet my professor is standing around all day, refusing to answer questions, while we work on Aleks. These people are paid to watch us work? I cannot learn online, but the entirety of Math 111 has moved to Aleks, since "student scores have gone up since." I guarantee you the school is getting paid to partner with this website.
8. I used to enjoy math before I used this program. Genuinely, I really did.

What an absolutely insane excuse of a math program, how has this been allowed to go on for so long?

I hate Aleks. Whenever I try to learn or do a topic in Aleks for school I cannot manage to actually learn it because the explanations are so terrible. The explanations say just do this and they don't explain why I do this or sometimes they just skip some parts and I don't understand the topic. If I could rate this lower than 1 I would but I can't. Schools if you are seeing this please don't make your students do this. It doesn't help.

Just don't even. My $#*! after i eat beans is better then this. This is the cause of respiratory problems, cancer, cardiovascular disease, leukemia, Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm, Aortic Aneurysm, Acanthamoeba Infection, Acinetobacter Infection, Aids, Acute Flaccid Myelitis, Adenovirus Infection, Adenovirus Vaccination, diabetes, Arthritis, B. Cepacia infection, Babesiosis, Bacillus anthracis, Bacterial Meningitis, Meningococcal Disease, Bacterial Vaginosis, Herpes, and obesity. Dont do aleks.

I learned absolutely nothing with ALEKS. They give terrible explanations on each topic then repeat the same type of question 5-6 times. If you even miss one space or misplace a decimal the whole question is marked incorrect and you're forced to do another 2-3 more of the exact same question. It's tedious, time-consuming, and absolutely useless.

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.

First of all, the explanations are irrelevant to the topic, mostly all of the explanations aren't the same as the problems you are given. The only good thing about this devil is that there's only 3 question if you get them all right if not... you'll basically be stuck in a infinite loop of questions. As you see in the picture my progress went from 45% to 33%!. Well you might blame me for making my progress go down but still.

In my Algebra I have to do 10 of these god forsaken lessons and every time you get one wrong it will undo your progress and it pisses me off.