0 of 20 Topics Completed. Those dreaded words make me want to gouge my eyes out. Instead, I get to work cramming in the month’s ALEKS right before the deadline.

ALEKS, the program in the math department that requires students in Algebra through Algebra 2 to complete a set number of lessons each month, often leaves students stressing about their math grade. 

You would think that all the pain and suffering is the price to pay for higher learning, but this is not what I’ve seen. ALEKS sucks at teaching math. 

Part of that is students—I’m not innocent—avoiding it. When I first got to Ames High, teachers required students to work on their topics for a certain amount of time, so they would open the website and then do nothing.

Teachers caught on and started requiring students to complete a specific number of topics each month. Nowadays, students (at least me) procrastinate doing all the work until the last minute or straight up don’t do it.

Usually when I am scrambling at the end of the month, I will seek out the easiest topics, ignore the convoluted explanations, and try to find the pattern in the example questions and answers. 

There is one topic that I clearly remember learning from. It was about simplifying radicals, which was a cool little nugget of knowledge. Except it had no relation to anything I was learning in class for weeks. 

Another ineffective learning tool that ALEKS employs is a “knowledge check.” It adds what feels like a mountain of review questions in front of you, blocking you from completing your actual topics. It would be tedious and time consuming work for someone who didn’t just click the “I don’t know” the whole time. I don’t know a single person who actually does their “knowledge check.”

ALEKS could be much more effective at teaching students if the explanations were better. More than that, students need a greater incentive to actually complete the topics. At the moment, not doing the “knowledge checks” just makes things easier for us.

Maybe it will get better at its job in the future, but I definitely won’t miss ALEKS in pre-calc next year.