Community reviews for ALEKS

The assessment of ALEKS as a teaching tool raises important concerns about its effectiveness. The platform's adaptive nature can create frustration, as students may feel overwhelmed by excessive workload or face difficulty when not engaging enough, leading to a steep decline in grades. The brief five-minute lessons mentioned in the app often lack depth, making it easy to forget the material shortly after learning it. Additionally, many users may find the system time-consuming without delivering significant value in return, ultimately deterring engagement. Given these issues, my suggestion to explore more interactive and effective alternatives is reasonable, as a better educational tool could promote deeper understanding and retention while fostering a more positive learning experience.

Aleks is overbearing on students, and the workload and amount of time required to complete work is insanely unnecessary. Horrible program.

In my college class, I have to take pre-algebra, which isn't an issue; however, I find the Aleks program to be an annoyance. With Aleks, students are told to reach a certain number of topics/lessons and hours. I have to get 25 topics and get up to five hours. When you're dropped into a lesson, you're given an example; when you're ready, you can try the problems. As another reviewer said, it is fine when the problems are consistent since, in each lesson, there is a bar you have to fill out either to 3 or 5 points to progress to the next topic, and when you get multiple questions correct, getting a streak, you get 2 points. However, you're given an example and are dropped in to find out the example doesn't match the problem presented. It is annoying if you have a streak since getting a question wrong or using an explanation breaks it, which means spending more time on a topic. Aleks has video explanations; however, compared to programs such as Delta Math, they are rarely helpful and aren't a video form of the examples given to you, so expect to spend most of your time looking up Youtube videos to help you. After you reach a certain number of assigned topics, Aleks will give you a knowledge check. I was given 25 questions, and if you make a mistake, you have to relearn that topic. There are also comprehensive knowledge checks that appear later, and you need a code to get in. I'm not too fond of these since I'm given 25 questions, and if I mess up on a certain number of questions, I have to redo a vast number of topics. And it isn't that you have to redo 5 or 10 topics; it's way more. Last time, I had to redo 55 topics, losing much of my progress. When I went online to find out why, I discovered that since Aleks assumes you messed up on a question for a specific topic, you'll have issues with related topics, which doesn't make sense since the topics I have to relearn are usually easy, and I don't have problems with. So, messing up on these means I take a massive hit to my grade, meaning even if I do the regular tasks, they will not improve my grade since it's such a small amount. Compared to programs such as Delta Math, Aleks doesn't do a good job of teaching you or making you easily remember topics.

ALEKS is not structured well. It works if the questions are consistent, however ALEKS is designed to trick you, they consistently switch up how a problem is structure which hinders learning because you actually have no idea what you are supposed to do for certain problems. Many other issues is that you could do the math right and set it up right but if you don't get the exact answer they want they take away your correct answers. Just very frustrating to deal with and often causes students to be very frustrated and not want to complete the homework at all.

This website is extremely frustrating for learners and can even cause suicidal ideation and thoughts of self harm in distressed students. I would never advise anyone use ALEKS due to it's practice of taking away past correct answers when a student gets a problem wrong in the present. It is a miserable spiral and teachers shouldn't force that upon anyone they want to succeed

Blech.

Pages that reflect the student's perspective on ALEKs.com https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/aleks.com https://ihatealeks.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/hello-world/ Aleks, like many other online math resources, is only viable for a short while. The nature of the online resource runs students into the ground with the teacher's ability to assign an amount of topics every week. Only strengthen the instructor's ability to invade home life with meaningless, mindless work that can only benefit the students that really are excited about going super far in math. Otherwise, it is a wretched program that threatens student grades, and decreases student's willingness to continue participating in the program before they give up. Much like me and many of my peers this year, I have grown tired of Aleks, and have started to burn out on the program, while others have put it off for weeks because the program invades their time at home and is, just, not a good solution to keep many of us in the mood to learn math. And the Knowledge Checks are horrific. They catch you at any moment. The worst part of their nature is the set time that they happen. My instructor, for example, has Knowledge Checks about every 5 hours, or every 10 completed topics. So if you only take 2 hours to complete 10 topics (and it gets harder as you go), you are left with 3 hours to complete 10 more topics that you may have a little bit of a harder time grasping because the math does not click as fast; leaving you to spend your 3 hours reading and re-reading the instructions instead of completing topics. Probably the most annoying thing about this fact is the teacher's choice to grade you on your progress enough. As helpful and innocent as it may be, my instructor grades based on how many more topics we have learned from the last time she graded, and be aware, the Knowledge Checks will knock off or add topics from/to the overall amount you "know," leaving some of us to have to learn 30 topics opposed to the regular 10; consequently, if you are lucky to have a nose for math, your probably gonna get shunned by the others in the class because of how fast you breeze through the Knowledge Check, and how little effort you have to put in to get the grade you want. All in all, Aleks, from one standpoint is good, mediocare at best, really, for teaching kids math. It allows the teachers to further cut time out of weekends and weeknights that you do not have to worry about homework, and gives them more leverage to hit you where it hurts: Your Grade. Which for us high schoolers is really important if we wanna, you know, have a successful post high school and post school experience. https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/aleks.com https://ihatealeks.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/hello-world/

I think this is a great tool to use, but only if the students take advantage of it. It could be very beneficial to students who do want to get extra practice. For example, I have some students who do not care too much about my class, so they typically do not do any of the Aleks work that I assign (hence, I'm wasting money on a subscription for them). But the students who do want to do better do in fact take advantage of it and are able to learn at their own pace. The best feature is probably that the program doesn't follow a specific order, but it regularly gives knowledge checks to each student to assess what they know and what they need more practice with, then constructs the lessons based off of that knowledge check. So every student could theoretically be working on a different area of weakness.

Overall, I really like ALEKS and it has served the purpose for which I need it. I would like to see improvement on the graphics front it keep students more interested - it is bit too much like a traditional textbook right now.