By Anonymous
(USA)
Visitor Review:
I signed up our age 10 child for some extra math exercise through the Connections Academy Summer Smarts Program, which is supposed to assess your child and then give assignments to your child. Tutoring comes with the $90+ fee. The assessments were very basic at first, yet they were timed (which is difficult for a child trying to find the number keys in the requisite number of seconds) and tedious. Only a week later did the teacher say we didn’t have to do ALL the assessments, just the top parts.
Our child wasted HOURS on basic addition and subtraction assessments, when in fact she was ready for fractions and decimals! We never did get to the fractions and decimals, because I let her quit. After the addition and subtraction, we got more very basic but time-consuming assessments to do.
Unfortunately, they were not delivered online in a timely manner, and so it was WEEKS into the course when we still had these very basic assessments going on. The teacher apologized to everyone and said the glitch was being worked on by the powers-that-be.
Surely, someone could have come up with a decent, one-day assessment? I also noticed other parents complained of the teacher not being at his computer during online office hours, which were really just a voice connection and a white board. There was nothing very interesting about it — no true online classroom or face-to-face.
We wasted time that I could have used just tutoring my child myself at a level where she was at, rather than jumping through hoops at Connections Academy. I took it as a $90 lesson on who NOT to use for a school-year homeschool curriculum service.