Imagine waking up at 7:45 and doing hours of schoolwork. Difficult right? Kids wake up and do hours of school and then look forward to spending the rest of their time relaxing and enjoying time with their family. IXL creates problems for most students, and it gives stress to many students.

IXL was created by Paul Mishkin in 1998. His main purpose in making this website was for a way to explore all different forms of learning and share interactive study materials. But is IXL actually helping us? In IXL, when you get a question correct the points usually only go up a little bit or by one but once you get one wrong it brings the student’s “SmartScore” down more points then they would get if they got it correct.

I know that there have been so many occasions where I gave up on IXL and then just got a bad grade due to how stressful it was. I was thinking if I go through this then other students probably face this problem as well. I interviewed five different students about what they thought about the IXL program. All five out of five said that IXL has caused them stress and frustration at some point. One student even said it pushed them to the point where they almost threw their own computer.

The more that students are getting frustrated and giving up or quitting IXL, the less motivated they are to learn the subject. It brings their grade down and makes them even more frustrated. Plus, teachers don’t usually assign just one they’re assigning multiple so imagine how difficult that could be for the students.

Even though I know teachers are just trying to have extra practice for their students, IXL leads to stress. Once you get to a 90 in IXL, you enter the challenge zone but if you get something wrong you can still go down multiple points. I don’t think this should happen because if the student got to the 90% SmartScore they clearly understand the topic and should not be punished for it.

The accepted guideline in the USA that is supported by the National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association states “Children should not spend more than 10 minutes on homework each day”. For me, IXL takes at least one hour for each one and the five students that I’ve talked to seemed to spend around the same amount of time. Also, teachers are assigning more than one so it can take all day to accomplish.

In summary, students should not be assigned so many texts for the sake of their mental health.