Hello all,
Just wanted to chime in here to provide perspective. I know the student who has created this post, and while I don't want to publicly talk about the particulars of that student's experience, I can give you some information about the features in question.
First, at Knewton we are fanatical about serving our students. We have a team dedicated to reviewing customer feedback, talking with students and prospective students over the phone and via email, and doing user testing, all to ensure we're always listening to what you all want in a test prep course.
The OP refers to fundamental math work. We have over 300 learning objects and videos for quant alone that deal with what we call "atomic concepts" -- the very basic building blocks of the concepts found on the GMAT. It is true that we had some exercises called pretests that did not have explanations associated with them. These are non-test-like questions that just focus on single, fundamental concepts. We have hundreds of them. By design, we originally left out explanations to these questions as we wanted students to take these just for remediation and focus more on the learning objects and, ultimately, the GMAT-style questions. However, we found that there was a subset of students who really wanted to review explanations to these questions, so we made it a project. In April, we deployed the explanations to these pretest questions, over 800 of them. We heard student feedback, and we jumped on it. There is a not a single question in the Knewton course now without a detailed explanation.
uwhusky, I appreciate your sentiment. In any company, resources need to be allocated for the most efficient use -- classic b-school operations management. At Knewton we use an agile development cycle to prioritize and execute our product roadmap. We try our best to accommodate each student's needs, but also must prioritize those that are of the greatest value to the greatest number of students. I appreciate the needs of the OP and am distressed we were not able to help the student more -- I consider the student's frustration a failure of ours that we will use to make us better. No business can ever make every single customer ecstatic, but that won't stop us from trying.
We'll also be unveiling a public community forum in the upcoming weeks so have open dialog with our students -- questions, feature requests, technical issues, etc., all out in the open. We are here for one reason: to give our students the best prep option we can.
Lastly, I'm not sure of the last post's question on the OG, but our teachers do review OG material in our course office hours and in our academic support.
Sorry for the lengthy response, but I just wanted to make sure that everyone understands what we at Knewton stand for.
Best wishes,
Chris
