Starting with Mr. Jeff Fix in AP Government, Albert has taken the school by storm. Albert.io is a website where students are assigned questions graded for accuracy to complete as assignments. The teacher assigns a problem set on Albert.io for the students to complete and they work together to accomplish it and get the best score possible. Many teachers see the benefit of practice questions that demands students work hard in order to answer the questions correctly. They believe that these Albert questions improve the quality of learning in their classes and are convinced that students learn the material wrong. The truth, however, is quite the opposite.

In order to understand the flaws of Albert.io, it is important to see how an Albert assignment is done in practice. The assignment is given to the students digitally in class. In many classes, the students break up into groups to finish the Alberts. With a big enough group, individuals will sacrifice a point in order to get the right answer and tell the rest of the group. The goal of the group is to finish the Albert assignments with minimal thought. When they are executed in class, the goal goes from learning to getting the questions answered as fast as possible. If the assignment is given as an individual assignment, some work hard to get them done and learn the material. These students are few and far between. The majority of students will wait until some students have all the answers, and then copy them because it’s faster and easier.

Alberts are inherently flawed because they create high-pressure situations in which submitting one answer will immediately lead to a right or wrong result. This puts pressure on students because getting questions wrong directly impacts our grade as most Alberts are graded on accuracy and that score is reflected in the students’ grades. This means that the fear of getting a question wrong outweighs a student’s desire to learn the material. Thus students will do anything to get the answer right which leads to an inevitable increase in cheating.

After an assignment is assigned on Albert, there are two types of people. The first group is the people who do not like procrastinating. They will do the assignment immediately and completely, doing every question potentially without cheating. They will gain the most from Albert questions because they actually read and answer them. Especially because Albert’s AP test prep curriculum does not always line up directly with the curriculum of the classes that they are being used in, grading them for accuracy is not fair to the students. However, this also means that they risk getting questions wrong because they are the first ones to submit the questions. The students who wait longer to even start the assignment have a higher chance to do well because there’s already a population of students who have finished the assignment and have the answers. Students who take the Albert honestly will generally get lower scores than their classmates who are able to suss out the answers from their more honest peers. Bottom line: Albert penalizes people who do the work honestly and benefit the people who cheat.

Students learn more and more to cheat because it is the only way that their grades will not suffer. They don’t care anymore about learning the material because it only hurts them.

There is an argument that the students who cheat will eventually be penalized on the test because they do not understand the material. This may be true, but the fact that the cheaters are penalized on the test while the people who do the work honestly are being penalized for getting questions wrong on Alberts put them on an even playing level. And that is the problem. Cheaters and people who do the work should not be on the same playing field, and yet the use of Alberts makes this possible. It is advantageous for cheaters and diminishes a student’s desire to actually learn the material when they can cheat, spend less time on the assignment, and get a better grade overall.

Therefore, teachers should stop grading Alberts for accuracy.