Unless you are gifted in math, DO NOT take a course with ALEKS offered. Seriously. Unless you have all the free time in the world and the patience of a saint, this demonic program will make you hate your life.
When you first start ALEKS, you will be given an initial knowledge check, which if you get anything wrong on it, you will be forced to do them as "review". Note that these "review" topics will be utterly useless to the subject/homework you will be learning and will just take up all your time. But that's not even worst part, you HAVE to do them just to get to your homework. Aleks, being the piece of satanic shit is, will LOCK you out of doing your assigned homework unless you finished the 30-50 review topics. A 14 topic assignment from teacher can easily become a 60 topic assignment if you got a lot wrong on the initial check. None of the "review" topics are remotely useful and are just annoying, frustrating busywork delaying you from getting to your actual homework. But that's not all.
When doing ALEKS homework, if you get one question wrong (even by the slightest marginal error) it will be considered wrong. Now, since it's a computer program and not a human, I understand that. But this is the hellspawn that is ALEKS. You won't just merely get a wrong answer, oh no, no, no! ALEKS will TAKE AWAY the last answer you got right. That's right. You get PUNISHED for a wrong answer. So unless you are 100% perfect on every topic, it can take an hour or more to finish a topic. Add that to a whole bunch of useless review problems not a assigned by the professor, and you've got a recipe for a failed class. But I'm not done yet!
You will still have to take periodic knowledge checks! Which are totally useless and take up your time! And if you get anything wrong you have to do that same shit, ALL. OVER. AGAIN. Let's be realistic, people often forget concepts after they don't need them anymore, but with ALEKS you need to have the memory of a go***mn elephant. Or forever be stuck in the Hell that is review topics.
There's no way to do this program well without "cheating" (and by that I mean, using online calculators, mathway, desmos, mathpapa, google the problem etc) or just being a natural genius at math. If you try to attempt this clean, you will want to commit suicide. And I know it's not a person, but ALEKS deserves to be skinned alive and have every part of its body slowly set on fire while its eyes are being scooped out with a rusty fork as its family is fo
