I-Ready

i-Ready is an educational assessment tool developed by Curriculum Associates used by various schools across the United States to provide teachers with data needed to target instruction for their most-needed students.

Why it Sucks

 * 1) The whole premise of the program is to make you dumber every time you use it, and to punish you for wrongdoing. Simply put, this app teaches almost nothing and simply lowers grades (see WIS #2).
 * 2) Terrible grading. If you get three questions wrong on a quiz at the end of a lesson, you will have to take the entire lesson all over again! You could end up being stuck on one lesson for hours, thanks to their length.
 * 3) When you get an answer right, the lesson will still explain how to do something over and over.
 * 4) A lot of the stuff taught in i-Ready is recycled stuff that students already learned in third grade or something.
 * 5) The characters of Plory and Yoop, who act as the virtual instructors of the software, are dumb.
 * 6) The voice acting for the instructional videos is horrible, and you'll have difficulty trying to understand what they're trying to say. Not to mention the lip-syncing is horrible too.
 * 7) Same thing goes for the animation in those videos, making it look like they were made in the Windows XP version of Windows Movie Maker, and the video quality is so low, making it look pixellated as if it were made in Microsoft Paint. The human characters stand with their arms down and their hands sprawled. The art direction looks a lot like something if it were an asset flip - reminiscent of clipart taken from Google Images and animated.
 * 8) The interface is awful.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The booklets and packets you make with the software are a good feature.