Why Galloway Should Ban the ALEKS Math Program

Last semester, I wrote an article about AP courses, and I interviewed several teachers about the evolving culture at Galloway. One teacher, who felt particularly strongly, expressed serious concerns about the direction in which the school was heading, specifically in regards to turning into a “teaching to the test” kind of school. “I know that something has changed here when a student comes into my class and says ‘I couldn’t get the homework done because I was up until one in the morning doing ALEKS, my computer froze on my last problem, and I had to restart.’ What about that is Galloway-esque?” Ever since then, I have become painfully aware of the extent of this problem and feel inclined to finally take it to paper. 

For those who are unfamiliar, the ALEKS math program is an online homework program that many teachers at Galloway use to assign homework by week. For example, if I’m learning about fractions, I would get eight to fourteen topics that week all about adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying fractions. Within that topic, I have to get 3 or 5 questions in a row correct, depending on the difficulty, before I can move on. 

Let’s say I’m finally on the last question on one of my topics, and the problem I’m given is multi-step and lengthy. After lots of tedious work, I submit my answer, and it’s incorrect. ALEKS would proceed to bump me back two problems and cancel out the previous question I did get correct. This is obviously inadequate, for if a teacher is grading my math test and I miss one problem, they don’t go back and mark the last question one wrong too. 

These ALEKS topics are not simple concepts and cannot (and should not) be taught by a robot. Learning is a transformative experience cultivated by conversations in order to grow. 

Personally, I am a hardworking student who has always understood and enjoyed math to an extent. Frankly, I am the type of student Galloway celebrates. I bring in questions when I’m confused about something; I advocate for myself; I am organized and stay on top of my work; I take advantage of our unique opportunities. Most importantly, I enjoy learning. Yet, ALEKS brings me nothing but frustration, and I cannot help but question my intelligence as a whole. 

We have pretty smart kids at The Galloway School, right? When you give students a program that causes stress due to its inefficiency, they are bound to figure out a way to outsmart the program, and that’s the reality here. Ethics are only so important when you have five other assignments to get done for the night.  If one were to survey the math classes at Galloway, there is no way you wouldn’t find that the vast majority of students haven’t used some sort of “cheating” mechanism to get their ALEKS done for the week. Perhaps a better survey would be to ask students their favorite method of cheating on ALEKS. Even those who don’t technically cheat can quickly figure out the algorithm to getting a problem correctly on ALEKS. Some will even pay tutors just to sit with their kids and do the problems alongside them to check their work. 

Additionally, once I get through my topics for the week, most of the time I forget the material entirely. This isn’t a flaw on the student’s part; it is the epitome of teaching to the test. If you memorize a vocabulary list for a test, chances are you won’t remember it a week later. Once I make it through a given topic, the short-term knowledge I learned to get through it exits my brain and inflows the algorithm of the next topic. 

When Elliott Galloway founded The Galloway School, he famously said that learning takes place through relationships. To symbolize this, we have a statue of a teacher and a student sitting together on a log right on our front lawn. ALEKS is no conversation on a log. Perhaps, we’re only emphasizing that part of our philosophy in our admissions tours instead of the actual classroom. But that’s an article for another time. 

ALEKS is a flawed program, period. We might not be able to dismantle the website itself, but we can eliminate it from Galloway’s curriculum. It’s just a question of whether or not we as a community find it to be enough of a priority. The educational world is only getting more competitive, and it’s safe to say our educators may feel compelled to keep up with the newest fads, this very math program being one of them. If we ultimately decide that ALEKS does have a place in our school, we must also reconsider the direction our school is heading in, for it might not resemble the one Elliott Galloway originally intended.