EdmentumReviews of edmentum.com

The way this website teaches math is not helping at all. There is little to no explanation, and the explanation that is given does not make any sense whatsoever. There is no way to talk to a real teacher, and the courses other than math teaches you nothing. They are too simple, with no grade appropriate skills taught at all. This website shouldn’t be used.

Edmentum is stupid and completely unnecessary for anybody in my high school. The reason being is that none of what we are learning in Edmentum, we are using in our classes. My school decided to replace our advisory time with Edmentum, and I feel that it has done nothing to improve my peers academically.

Some classes are bearable, while other are downright insufferable. I've taken (and/or are taking) Advanced Placement English Lit and Comp, Calculus, Honors Chemistry, Economics, Government, Professional Photography, Creative Writing, and Culinary Arts. A few of the classes, like Economics, Government, Creative Writing, Honors Chemistry (the best of the classes in my opinion), and Culinary Arts were fine, but I have issues with the others. English Lit and Comp is EXTREMELY repetitive. As well as this, almost every tutorial wants you to read 3 or more short stories which, by themselves, would take several hours for just the reading. Most of the time, you don't even need to read these in order to get good scores on the mastery tests. You don't even need to do most of the tutorials to get a 100% since half of the course is telling you how to write an essay in the same way over and over again. Now for Photography. The tutorials assume you use an expensive camera with interchangeable lenses and about 10 different manual settings. They also expect you to remember all the different affects of these settings as well as a bunch of different camera lenses. Yes, this would be easy if you took notes even without a fancy camera, but there's more I have issues with. This class has, by far, the most fill in the blank questions where you need to type in a word. About 1/3 the time, they don't tell you what the word is in the tutorial. Also, this class has so many questions with over 5 different parts you need to match (I'll talk more about these later). Another bizarre complaint I have came from a test I took today. The question asked me how much food and water should you put in an emergency kit in case you got stranded in a remote area (the answer being in days). Remember, this is a photography course, not emergency survival. Now to, the big one. Calculus. I despise this class. Very minimal refreshers from precalculus. They assume you know things that they don't even cover in this course. They also "teach" how to work out problems in the most complex way. Cherry on top? They don't explain it. They show you the steps without any explanation. How did they get to this part of the problem? They won't tell you. I tried to look up videos to help me understand what they were teaching, but I found none that matched the lessons. Even my calculus teacher couldn't solve a problem in one of the tests I got. None of the multiple choice answers matched hers. How can you expect a high schooler to learn calculus when a person who dedicated their life to math can't solve your questions? And finally, I'll cover problems I have with the website as a whole. Remember the multi-part questions from earlier? Yeah, if you have one with 10 different parts, and you get one wrong, the whole question is counted wrong. No half points. This and written fill-in the blanks have caused me to score poorly on some tests (looking at you, photography). The website is also littered with dead and broken links. Some links work, but send you to a completely different page then you need. Some courses are heavily reliant on links (calculus, lit and comp, and chemistry) which can make some of the lessons near impossible to fully learn. I covered repetition as an issue earlier, but another problem I have is the amount of filler text in the tutorials. Some tutorials would take me twice as long to get through as they should because of all the filler text. It drowns out some of the important information and makes it hard to keep my focus on since half of the lesson means nothing for me. Lack of video tutorials is also a major problem for me. Yes, there are videos, but most are either introductions, or information dumps. Calculus, the class that needs the most demonstration, has absolutely zero videos. Any videos for it are from dead links that don't work anymore. Even so, there were about 3 or less links for videos. And my last issue is the amount of work given. If you have 7 classes, AKA the normal amount for a high school student, prepare to do several hours of work everyday unless you want to fall behind and work on weekends. I took 7 classes first semester and my spirit and motivation were crushed. I have 5 classes this semester, but I'm still suffering from major burnout from last semester. Also, I had work that was due OVER SPRING BREAK. Technically, I did have a spring break, but I had to crack down on the "late work" in order to not fall behind. The workload last semester also made me work through my Thanksgiving break (3 days). The only break I've had so far with no work due was winter break, and it was about a week shorter than it should have been.

I started taking a course which the content for it was on Edmentum. Honestly I haven't learned anything from it yet after 3 months. The information you learn on Edmentum is so vague and general and they expect you to understand it thoroughly after one passage of text. They say it is encouraging but it is DISCOURAGING. On their website, it says less frustration more growth but it is the exact opposite. It makes you even more frustrated because they skip ahead to advanced content that you won't even understand. They give you a short passage and a diagram and expect you to understand a whole month's work in 5 minutes. Edmentum also has this platform called Study Island which I have heard doesn't help either. So in short, if you are considering using Edmentum, reread my title and think again.