We Tried ALEKS, Apex, and BYU for Online Geometry: What Worked and What Didn’t
The pie chart on the screen kept spinning, filling in a little more each time my daughter answered another question. She was sitting at the kitchen table, knee bouncing, clicking through what looked like a never-ending set of similar triangles. It was the third round of that same concept, and she was getting them right every time, but the assignment wouldn’t let her move on until she’d done another five. She put her head down on the table. “I hate this,” she said. I didn’t blame her. We were four weeks into our first experiment with ALEKS, and I was starting to wonder if we’d made a mistake.
We’d pulled our daughter, a ninth grader, out of a traditional classroom for a number of reasons—some school-related, some family-related. Geometry was the course that worried me most. Algebra had been rocky, and the idea of trying to teach proofs and transformations at home felt like a recipe for daily fights. So I did what most parents do in that situation: I asked around, read some threads, and signed her up for the first option that came up over and over again. ALEKS.
If you’ve never used ALEKS, the premise is straightforward. Your child takes an initial assessment, the program figures out what they already know, and then it gives them a pie chart with colors representing different topics. They work on a topic, answer a few questions, and the program tells them whether they’ve mastered it. It’s efficient, it’s adaptive, and it’s very, very good at finding exactly what a student doesn’t know. That’s also its downfall, at least for my daughter. ALEKS doesn’t really teach. It offers a short explanation if you click the right button, but mostly it just gives you a problem and then waits to see if you can solve it. For a kid who already kind of knows the material, that’s fine. For a kid who needs to hear the “why” before they can attempt the “what,” it’s a constant cycle of guessing and feeling stupid.
I remember sitting next to her one afternoon, watching her try to work through a problem about angle bisectors. She was using a formula she’d half-remembered from a previous checkpoint. It was wrong. The program turned red, the explanation popped up, and she clicked through it quickly, shrugged, and asked if she could move on. I asked her to explain it back to me. She couldn’t. She’d gotten comfortable with clicking until it felt right, not until she understood it. That was when I realized ALEKS is a wonderful tool for practice and for prepping for a test, but it’s not a full geometry education on its own. Not for her.
So we made the move to Apex Learning. Apex is what a lot of online schools use as their main curriculum. It’s structured like a real course: there are units, lessons with readings and videos, practice problems, and then a quiz or test at the end of each section. It has a gradebook, pacing guides, and a real sense of progression. After the chaos of ALEKS, that structure felt like exactly what we needed.
And it was, at first. My daughter actually watched the videos. She took notes. She started asking me questions about concepts rather than just clicking the “help” button. The first two units went by uneventfully, which in homeschool parent terms means we were both in a good mood. But then something started to shift. She was moving through the lessons quickly, too quickly. I noticed that she could pass the quizzes easily but couldn’t tell me much about what she’d learned. I sat down with her one day and asked about the lesson on triangle congruence. She could name some shortcuts—SAS, ASA, that kind of thing—but when I asked her why they worked, she said, “The video said they’re shortcuts.” That’s when it hit me: Apex is a course you can complete without actually learning much. The videos are clear and polished, but they’re not interactive. There’s no one standing there asking your child to explain their thinking. If the quiz is multiple choice, a kid can guess, flip back to the lesson, or just memorize the pattern.
I’m not saying Apex is a bad program. It’s honestly the most traditional of the three options in terms of structure. For a kid who is internally motivated and already reads at a high level, it might be all they need. But my daughter isn’t that kid. She’s a learner who needs to talk things through. She needs to make mistakes out loud and have someone rephrase the concept in a way that suddenly clicks. Apex wasn’t giving her that, and I wasn’t giving her that either, because I was relying on the program to do the teaching. That was my fault, not theirs.
The low point came in late October. She failed a unit test, mostly because she’d rushed through the lessons and hadn’t actually practiced the constructions with a compass and straightedge. We both sat there looking at the grade, and I felt that familiar mix of frustration and guilt. I thought, There has to be a better way. That’s when I called a friend who used to teach high school math and asked what she actually thought about online geometry. She said something that stuck with me: “A course is only as good as the person checking the work. Online programs are just packaging.”
That led us to BYU Independent Study. If you’ve ever looked at BYU’s online high school courses, you’ll know they’re kind of old-school. There’s less flashy animation. The lessons are text-heavy, with a lot of reading and diagrams, and you move through a fairly linear sequence. The assessments are still online, but there are also assignments that aren’t auto-graded. A parent or a teacher has to sit down and look at drawn constructions or written explanations and give feedback. That was terrifying to me, because I hadn’t done geometry in twenty years, and I definitely didn’t remember the correct way to bisect an angle with a compass.
But that requirement to actually engage with her work turned out to be the most useful part of the whole year. Once a week, I sat down with my daughter and her notebook. I didn’t need to know the math well enough to teach it—I just needed to see if she could show me what she was doing. Sometimes she’d explain it correctly and I’d nod, pretending I understood completely. Other times she’d stumble, and we’d flip back to the BYU lesson text, reading a paragraph together until she found the mistake. It wasn’t smooth, and neither of us handled it with perfect patience. But the key difference was that someone was checking her work, and she knew it. She couldn’t just fill in an answer and move on. She had to produce evidence of her thinking.
That made me rethink ALEKS and Apex. Both of them have important roles. ALEKS is great practice for retention—we still use it now, for twenty minutes a day, as a warm-up. It’s quick and painless and gives us both a clearer idea of what’s sticking. Apex is useful as a reference, and honestly, its video lessons are sometimes clearer than what I can explain over dinner. But neither one was enough on its own. The missing piece wasn’t a platform at all. It was the part where a human being sits down and says, “Show me how you got that.”
If you’re a parent trying to choose between these three programs, I’d give you the same advice my math-teacher friend gave me. First, figure out who’s going to be doing the checking. If you have a kid who can work independently and a schedule that lets them study for an hour a day, Apex is probably the most complete, least stressful option. If you have a kid who hates being asked to explain themselves, ALEKS might give you the least resistance, but you’ll need to add your own instruction on top. And if you have the ability and the willingness to sit with your child and review their work, BYU’s independent study course is worth the extra effort, even if it feels clunky. None of these programs will teach geometry by themselves. Online geometry isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing. It’s more like a juggling act—you have to keep your eyes on the ball, know your kid’s quirks, and be ready to step in when the platform runs out of tricks.
Right now, we’re using all three. ALEKS for daily drills, Apex for video demos when the BYU text gets dry, and BYU as the actual course. It’s not neat. Some weeks we fall behind, and I have to remind her that finishing the pie chart isn’t as important as being able to sketch a decent triangle. She’s passing, but she still doesn’t love geometry. I’m not sure any online program could fix that. What I’ve learned, sitting at that kitchen table, is that the program matters far less than the rhythm we build around it. And we’re still building that rhythm, one proof at a time.
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