Re:Is MathAcademy Worth It? Thoughts After 2k Experience Poi...
by modernerd on Monday September 16, 2024 @08:59AM
(#41555625)
For me it was not controversial, just imperfect. The perfect diagnostic would learn in one pass what the student has already mastered and not leave them with study material they can already answer at 100%.
I didn't think anything was seriously wrong, just wrong enough to be annoying for the first few days because I wasn't learning much and the system is rigid and zero trust — I have no way to tell it I understand except by hard proof.
It's also a balancing act, though. Under-estimating a student's ability on purpose might frustrate them a little but offer a small confidence boost while they're still learning the system and finding a daily rhythm. Over-estimating could make them feel stupid and intimidated and drive them to drop out early.
I found it a bit controversial too, but it makes sense if you consider the goals of MA / creator's approach. MA aims for "you're going to learn to mastery, passing 100% or you don't know the subject yet". Which works great if that's what you're after, and less well if you want to just get to know the landscape and be more comfortable appling a few things every few months. (One of the reasons I dropped out was when it made me do way too many vector/matrix multiplications that felt like busy work I'm never going to do manually, but it would make sense at uni time) You can trigger the diagnostic again btw if you think something's seriously off.