IXL sucks. It makes students cry. Half an hour spent on a single, several part problems, only to get it wrong because you forget a closed parentheses. Then, BOOM! Your “Smart”Score is set back from an 80 to a 65.  Answering just one more question correctly won’t bring you  back to where you were before, no, it must be two or three more. IXL pauses the timer for how long one has been spending on it after a certain time of not interacting with it, providing teachers with false information on how long students are spending. What was actually six hours on an IXL (with questions that take a lot of off computer time) will appear as two.

Without intervention, students will continue spending so much time on menial problems instead of learning more about the topic. Each IXL question set is incredibly formulaic, with each question in a section asking essentially the same thing as the last. To get through a unit, one must spend much more time than it takes to master the subject. Students all over the globe are suffering due to this cruel program. IXL is not only an ineffective learning tool, it’s torture, and therefore, should be banned by the Geneva Conventions. Common Article three prohibits torture and cruel treatment of individuals, and yet IXL still is used in so many classrooms.
While explicitly banning IXL in the Geneva Conventions would not legally require teachers to stop using it, if it were considered a war crime it would certainly discourage the implementation of the program.