Basically, you should know that IXL is a terrible program for homework. The reason being that it causes stress amongst students due to their "SmartScore system." The SmartScore system basically gives you more points the more answers you answer correctly, and also subtracts more points the more answers you get wrong. (the score is from 0-100, 100 being mastery, 90 being excellence, and 80 being proficiency) At the beginning of "learning" a skill (when your SmartScore is 69 or under), when you get a answer right, you get can gain about 5-10 points as opposed to only losing about 1-5 points when you get an answer wrong. But, by the time your SmartScore is in the 70's, you really only gain 3 points for getting an answer right whilst you lose about 5 or 6 points for getting an answer wrong. And by the time your SmartScore is in the 80's or 90's, you only ever gain 2 points for getting an answer right whilst getting an answer wrong can lose you about 6 or even up to 10 points. 

Because of this stressful system it can cause students to either 1. keep stressing excessively on the skill until they are at least at a score that they designate as "good enough", or 2. cause students to just give up altogether on the skill, or 3. cause students to cheat on the skill.

What these 3 results all have in common is that student will have most likely never actually learned the skill and instead just have caused themselves so much unnecessary stress for absolutely nothing!

Overall, IXL can be a good system to actually learn new "skills," but it shouldn't be assigned by teachers as graded schoolwork/homework because that just causes stress and we don't want students extremely and unnecessarily stressed over "learning" new things. 

Ideally I would love IXL to be used as an opportunity for students to learn more about subjects they are studying/not studying to truly expand their overall academic growth, as opposed to IXL being used as graded schoolwork and/or homework (which as I just explained, is bad)

So please, students, parents, and maybe even teachers; sign this petition for sake of saving the sanities of some of Amarillo's schoolkids! (remember, not every school does IXL as graded schoolwork/homework, that's why I said "some of Amarillo's schoolkids")