“At IXL Learning, we are passionate about improving learning for all. We apply technology in thoughtful and innovative ways to unlock learners’ innate curiosity, creativity, and desire for knowledge.” This is the mission statement of the learning platform, IXL. This platform was developed to give students immediate feedback and track their progress. However, across the country, kids seem to hate IXL. On most review platforms, the app is rated incredibly low. What is this company doing wrong that makes children dread their app?
In IXL’s reviews on Common Sense Media, there is a clear, disturbing trend of parents begging people not to let children use it. Owen D., a parent to a 7-year-old, stated, “This Website is awful. I’m posting this as my 7-year-old son is at dinner with me at home and doing IXL, a supposed fun learning site, but instead of having fun and being happy, he is talking to me about killing himself” (Common Sense Media). This kid is unfortunately not the only one who feels this way about IXL. While the app is rated four stars by Common Sense Media, 7,872 parents and children overwhelmingly rate it a one, many saying they would rate it lower if they could, some, equating it to child torture.
How could a simple learning app be so hated by families? A large number of students seem to mainly have a problem with the app’s SmartScore. According to IXL, SmartScore is “the best possible measure of how well a student understands a skill” (IXL). As a student progresses through the lesson, the questions get harder. However, the part that seems to be the biggest issue is the way the points increase and decrease depending on if you get a question right or wrong. When answering incorrectly, the score decreases far more than it increases when you are correct. As the questions get harder, correct answers give you fewer points, and wrong answers are punished by taking away more points. This doesn’t teach kids to learn from their mistakes; it teaches them to fear making mistakes. Many teachers set a SmartScore goal for their students as an assignment, yet this means kids may spend from a couple of minutes getting to the SmartScore to multiple hours.
While the SmartScore is the biggest issue, another issue is that IXL can’t recognize correct answers that aren’t exactly what the app wants. For example, a simple thing such as using a minus symbol instead of a negative symbol would normally be acceptable, but not for IXL. In addition to this, the app will sometimes count an answer wrong, despite being equivalent to the answer IXL wants. An anonymous student said, “It feels like I can’t do anything right on IXL. I get good grades, but I can never finish my work on IXL because I spend forever getting my score up again and again for only one wrong answer to send me to the beginning. This just makes me want to give up because no grade feels worth the stress it gives me.”
While some may take these criticisms of IXL as children not wanting to work hard or parents babying their kids, this is not the case. Under reviews for IXL, you can see students expressing high levels of stress and a hatred for learning through IXL. Meanwhile, other common apps used in schools don’t have these sorts of negative reviews from adolescents. To compare, a student talking about their experience on IXL said, “I’ve been a ‘gifted child’ my whole life and have almost always gotten straight A’s, so I have very, very high standards for myself and tend to get very upset when I don’t meet them. So when I mess up a question and see that stupid ‘Sorry, Incorrect’ explanation screen, I feel slightly more worthless every time. The ‘Smart Score’ system is terrible as well, as it tends to add only 1-3 points when you get a correct answer but then immediately take away 7-15 as soon as you get something wrong. This apparently makes it better at ensuring the student has mastered the topic, when really all it does is stress others and myself out, especially when we’re so close to meeting the finishing goal.” Meanwhile, a one-star review from Landon Catoe, a student using Google Classroom, simply states, “Everything is fine with it. I just really don’t like it because the teachers give us work on it” (Catoe). The difference in the language used in these reviews is clear. IXL isn’t hated because kids are lazy or just don’t want to use it.
Evidently, IXL has some major problems that make the user experience stressful. Taking these accounts into consideration, the best course of action for IXL is to fix the function of the SmartScore and adjust its program to accept correct answers written in different ways. If the company that owns IXL continues to ignore these criticisms of their app, more students will be subjected to an unnecessary amount of stress over what is supposed to be an easy, fun way to learn.
