Awful

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.

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.