Sofia Rositani — Reporter
Many freshmen at Southern must take the MAT 100p course, which incorporates the ALEKS program, regardless of their major.
On top of having a busy schedule, barely any free time, classes to attend and still needing time to eat between it all, students must put in at least two hours in either the math emporium or risk an automatic failure.
It is generally known that students around campus dislike the program. The problem with it is that, because everyone in the class is on different topics and objectives, students will rarely be on the same track as their classmates. Students will either excel on their own or fail on their own.
Upon entering Southern, students are immediately told to “get involved.” This program makes it hard for students to do so, a lot of students have been so busy getting their ALEKS objectives up that they have had hardly any free time to actually get involved.
Another problem with this is that a computer is not meant to be a teacher. Perhaps as a guide, but a professor should at the forefront of teaching students what they need to know to succeed. Students learn in different ways and for some they need actual guidance from a professor.
I have a lot of trouble learning from the program. Not only does it make the problems more complicated than they already are, but if a student gets multiple questions wrong, it just skips to the end instead of explaining the problem. When the program does explain, it does confusing and hard to understand the topic.
If a student goes through 24 topics and gets pushed back 12, they have to redo them all. This process is very dumb, because students have to go back to previous topics and redo things they already learned.
Students are stressed out as it is and having do ALEKS in a room full of students and computers for hours on end is ridiculous.
The amount of time swiped in doing work on a computer should not dictate if a student passes or fails a class. It is not an accurate way to measure a students intelligence.
Whether or not students are on a certain objective should not decide if they are able to take a midterm or final, and a computer should not be the deciding factor on passing a class – especially math.
