Anyone use Aleks?

[29palms]

Ok, been adviced to check that out. Sounds very reasonable. 99 bucks for 6 months. Good for college algebra. That will I know be a bear. I took intermediate algebra around in 1985 for my associates degree. That was a very long time ago. Can anyone summerize how aleks works? I looked in the web site, sounds great, only waiting for results from TESC to see what I actually need. Don't wanna jump into this and find out that I somehow got lucky and met that requirement. Nother thing I was also informed about straighterline, sounds good. 99 bucks per month till you pass. Is it conceivable to finish this course with a full work schedule at least within a couple of months or am I better off paying some college like LSU independent study for the full course where I can take up to 9 months to finish?

[valsacar]

ALEKS is ACE approved for their math courses. Process is pretty simple, you register and pick the class you want (with your "master account"). With your student account you take the class (system is designed for use by teachers as well as individuals, hence you get 2 accounts). You take a, long, pretest to determine where you need work. Class consists of sample questions from different sections, with detailed explinations if you get them wrong. Once you get 2-3 correct, in a row, it assumes you have mastered that subject. You keep going until it decides to test you again, your "completion percentage" goes up (or down) depending on how you do. Keep going until you have at least 70% completed (green, not blue on the progress bar). It IS POSSIBLE to get 70% or more right off the pretest, in which case you are done.

Once you hit that 70% mark, you go over to ACE and login (create account if you don't have one) and put in the request to have the records transferred. Once it shows on your ACE transcript, you can go back into your Master account and pick a new course to take. This is VERY IMPORTANT, DO NOT start a new course until the previous is on your ACE transcripts. Once you start a new course all records are deleted, so if you didn't put it on ACE you'll have to do it all over again.

You can complete them as fast as you want, I did 4 courses with them and one was done in a couple hours (passed the pretest), others took around 20 hours for me.

[AlbaTiVo]

valsacar gave you a great summary of ALEKS. I am taking Straighterline Business Communication just now and even taking one module a day it is not too time consuming and I also work full time and have 2 kids. I would say each module takes 1-2 hours although if you know the material you could just get stuck into the exams which would make the process really quick.

[29palms]

That was an excellent summary on Aleks. Thanks alot for that one. I did read up on it myself, but was just checking I was reading all this correctly, making sure. I didn't know about making sure that the transcripts got logged onto Ace. That's a great tip.
As far as STRAIGHTERLINE goes, 1-2 modules per day? How many modules are there per course? Albativo, I see you have taken college algebra. That may be one I need later on. Was that really hard?

[OE800_85]

If you go to the straighterline web site, they have a full syllabus for every course, and there's a section to show how it's graded, that'll show all the evaluated material. ALEKS is wonderful by the way. I might add, a great complement to it is Khan Academy. Watch the relevant video lectures for the topic (slowly, or all at once) and be sure to make notes, then just go after the ALEKS test, you'll probably get it the first time.

[AlbaTiVo]

I can only comment on the Business Communications class since this is my first Straighterline course, but there are 15 modules (10 questions in each totaling a potential 25 points) plus a midterm (150), final (200) and 3 papers - Routine Inquiry (100), Resume/Cover Letter (100) and Short Report (100).

For all three of the ALEKS courses I watched the KhanAcademy.com videos for each topic (being out of high school for 20 years these were agreat refresher) which took a few evenings and then took the initial test. For all three I got >70% for the initial test and did not therefore have to take any further action bar submitting my scores to ACE.

[kellen1]

Im taking the Alegebra class right now and those tips are helpful !

[kellen1]

ALEKS is ACE approved for their math courses. Process is pretty simple, you register and pick the class you want (with your "master account"). With your student account you take the class (system is designed for use by teachers as well as individuals, hence you get 2 accounts). You take a, long, pretest to determine where you need work. Class consists of sample questions from different sections, with detailed explinations if you get them wrong. Once you get 2-3 correct, in a row, it assumes you have mastered that subject. You keep going until it decides to test you again, your "completion percentage" goes up (or down) depending on how you do. Keep going until you have at least 70% completed (green, not blue on the progress bar). It IS POSSIBLE to get 70% or more right off the pretest, in which case you are done.

Once you hit that 70% mark, you go over to ACE and login (create account if you don't have one) and put in the request to have the records transferred. Once it shows on your ACE transcript, you can go back into your Master account and pick a new course to take. This is VERY IMPORTANT, DO NOT start a new course until the previous is on your ACE transcripts. Once you start a new course all records are deleted, so if you didn't put it on ACE you'll have to do it all over again.

You can complete them as fast as you want, I did 4 courses with them and one was done in a couple hours (passed the pretest), others took around 20 hours for me.

Im trying figure out if the blue percentage and green are added to together when I almost reached my score .