We love Khan Academy. Many of our students make use of it. At the very least, working in Khan provides more practice, and that’s almost always a good thing. And the price (free) is right.
Usually, when people bring up Khan Academy, what they really want to know is whether it could replace tutoring and/or SAT classes entirely. The answer is that it could. For a student who has good natural ability, a strong personal desire (not parental desire) to do really well on the SAT, the discipline to keep at it over many weeks (not just dabbling for an hour or two here and there), and the ability to work through rough patches on his or her own, Kahn could be a complete solution. Truly, such a student could have prepared for the SAT on his or her own even before Kahn existed, just using the College Board SAT Guide and working through all the practice tests. Our son’s college roommate did his own prep this way, reportedly spending 30 minutes each day after school, and got very high scores.
There are a few problems with Kahn. The big one is simply that most students do not meet the description above of the student who is well-suited for using Kahn. Lesser but still significant: Kahn is all video – that can be a slow, even tedious medium, and all the more so when the instructors try to work in some lame humor. And, as currently structured, it’s not easy in Kahn to go right to a particular area or type of question. Rather, Kahn wants the student to follow a sequence that is under Kahn’s control – this can be frustrating. Say you make a couple of mistakes in a section – just carelessness, not a true lack of understanding. The Kahn algorithms might conclude that you need a lot more work in that area and not let you proceed until you complete steps Kahn lays out – that’s just annoying.