Quizlet in the clutches of Capitalism: Their flop era

It’s Thursday night and right before you go to bed, you remember that you have your first vocabulary quiz of the school year. Like any normal person, you open Quizlet, a study program and lifesaver. However, it isn’t how you remembered it to be. Two of your favorite features, Learn and Test are now restricted to five rounds per flashcard deck or unlimited with a Quizlet Plus subscription at $7.99/month or $35.99/year. Gravity, a game where asteroids are falling and the correct answer must be typed to stop them, is completely gone. To make it worse, there are ads everywhere.

Quizlet was founded in 2005 by Andrew Sutherland, who was only 15 years old at the time. Its goal? To make “every single student unstoppable”, according to its website. However, this isn’t all that true. Quizlet has lost sight of its goal of being an accessible study tool for all students by removing useful features or requiring a QuizletPlus account to access them as well as integrating frequent ads.

Students aren’t very unstoppable if they’re stopped after five rounds of Learn or Test. When studying the parts of plants for biology class, you’ll only get to studying the roots. Learn offers customization from whether to answer using the term, definition, or both, questions in the form of multiple choice, open response, or a mix, or even to quiz only starred terms. Athena Yee-Wadsworth (16), a 10th grader at Boston Latin School, comments that “the restricted amount of uses of the Learn tool definitely limits the efficiency and quality of learning.”

Test offers similar features to Learn, along with a wider variety of question types, such as matching the definition to the term or true or false questions. These modes both have large amounts of customization so that they can be tailored to a student’s specific needs. In addition, they add variety to a monotonous study routine and keep students engaged. By requiring a QuizletPlus account to access them, countless of students will not be able to reach their full potential. 

Unlike Learn and Test, which at the very least still exist, Gravity has been removed. Gravity is a game with asteroids listing a prompt where the student has to type the correct answer to make them disappear before they hit the planet. Like Learn and Test, Gravity offered customization through different modes of difficulty, among others. When asked about its removal, Quizlet cites a lower usage compared to more popular modes. 

However, this isn’t a great reason. Games are effective for learning. In a research paper called Foundations of Game-Based Learning by New York University professor and founding director of CREATE Lab Jane L. Plass, researcher Bruce D. Homer, and Columbia University professor Charles K. Kinzer, they conclude that games help keep students engaged and make learning fun. It also wouldn’t make a huge impact on Quizlet itself if they decided to keep Gravity, as they have maintained it for years already, but it would have a profound impact on its users. The permanent removal of Quizlet’s Gravity is just another way to make already stressed students suffer more in hopes that they will be forced to buy a subscription that will return only some of the once-free modes to them. 

Not only are features being locked behind a paywall or removed, there are ads all over the place. When opening up Quizlet, an ad is waiting for you on the homepage. If you click on a study set, there’s another ad. No, two. And as you scroll down, trying to cram right before your vocabulary quiz, there are more! In your set of 33 flashcards, there are eight ads on the page. You might as well be studying Kohl’s Black Friday sale or $0 iPhones that are definitely a scam instead. Believe it or not, it gets worse. The ads change every few minutes, and some of them are even videos, making it impossible to focus.

Doing Flashcards? There’s an ad on the side. When you’re in the middle of flipping through your flashcards? BOOM. Another ad. This time, it’s a video and you have to wait before skipping it. The mode Write, where you have to type out either the term or definition when given the other, isn’t much better. Between every round, there’s an ad that you have to watch before skipping. And with Match, a mode of matching the term to the definition, between every few rounds, it’s the same story. You click on your profile to escape the ad-venture you’ve unintentionally been on, but there’s also an ad there.  

They’re in the most ridiculous places and are not only annoying but distracting as well. Quizlet is a studying platform, yet its excessive use of ads tells a different story, which is such a shame as Quizlet used to be a great resource for students to use. As Yee-Wadsworth put it, Quizlet was, “a fairly reliable way of studying or memorizing topics in school subjects,” which is a sentiment echoed by a myriad of students. 

Quizlet’s changes have sparked a divide in the learning community. Some students argue that Quizlet is not a non-profit, and therefore needs to make money to survive. They also reason that there are still a few aspects of Quizlet that are free, like Flashcards, Write, and Match, and that the ads are fair. Although it is true that Quizlet is a for-profit organization, the majority of Quizlet’s features are either removed, like Gravity, or behind a paywall, like Learn, Test, and Spell. In addition, the ads are everywhere: between your flashcards, after a round of Write, or even in your account settings. 

Quizlet has lost sight of its goal of being an accessible study tool for students through their requirement of a QuizletPlus account to access useful study modes, their removal of Gravity, and their mountains of ads. What if there were another way? One that didn’t cost $7.99/month or $35.99/year? And no, I’m not talking about becoming a vigilante like Taylor Swift’s new song and doing some suspicious things to the link and attempting to trick the system. I’m talking about alternatives to Quizlet. There are so many great ones: Gimkit, Anki, Omnisets, StudyKit, and more! Although it may feel like a lot of unnecessary work to switch platforms, it’s important to support businesses whose morals align with your own.