Anyone frustrated with ALEKS?

[Merlin]

Hi,

I'm pursuing a BA Math at TESU and I decided to take as many ALEKS math courses as I could - primarily as I thought they were quite cheap and I'd be able to get through them quickly. However, I find myself wondering if my presumptions were wrong or whether I'm using ALEKS the wrong way. 

I'm still trying to get through Precalculus. Many topics I already know and I seem to spend at least an hour each day "learning" and hoping to get to the next knowledge check. The topics on which I need to refresh my knowledge and take notes seem to be presented haphazardly - one moment it's logarithms, then it's trigonometry, then logarithms again, which makes it difficult to take notes and focus.

Does anyone have any advice on what I could change? I'm thinking of possibly ditching ALEKS and just studying for the CLEP. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

The goal of ALEKS is to teach you math, not prepare you for an examination. The way it works is it sees where you are via assessments/knowledge checks and then coaches you in areas where you showed weakness during the assessments. As new topics are covered it will periodically jump back to old topics to revisit those in order to reinforce what you learned. Once you reach a new threshold of knowledge it will provide an assessment to test your retention of the material that was recently covered. Based on the results, it will begin coaching you on the material you were weak in again. It will keep doing this until you reach 100% mastery if you wish.

Once you reach a total of 70% mastery or higher it will prompt you to take a timed ACE Knowledge check using the lockdown browser. If you manage to pass that with a 70% or higher score, you can then add it to your ACE transcript for college credit.

I personally like the ALEKS approach, it worked well for me. I took 4 different math courses via that system. However, when I went back for the Trigonometry and Statistics courses I used Khan Academy to revisit and practice before signing up for ALEKS again. Of course, that was also back before the ACE Knowledge Check was added and you could pass the course by getting 70% or better on the initial assessment.