Cengage Learning Reviews 591

Truly one of the worst companies for learning. Very exploitative when it comes to pricing, not only that, their services and grading schemes often disadvantage students.

I paid $200 for a new textbook directly from Cengage's website. It took 20 days for it to arrive, and it is clearly used. Pages are folded over, and gunk is spilled on the back cover. How can a publisher send a used textbook? What sort of third-rate operation is this? They are misrepresenting the authors who put in lots of work to produce the textbook, and intentionally misrepresenting their product by charging full price for a used book. Absolutely terrible.

i swear on the name of jesus christ, i have never seen a group of websites more poorly maintained, inconsistent, just flat out broken than the terrible trio of *.cengagenow.com, *.cengage.com, and cengageorg.my.site.com. these bumbling idiots have finally invented a method to force students to fail, get away with it, and not even offer working technical support alongside it. i use firefox, yeah? i get assigned assignments on their platform, OWLv2, for my chemistry class, yeah? on the majority of the assignments, there is a question worth six points, six! i attempt to complete the question but for some ungodly reason they somehow screwed up their implementation of jwplayer, and i have scoured the internet for a solution but nothing, and i mean nothing, works. i run a system check, and it says that firefox is a supported browser type, and windows NT is a supported operating system. funnily enough, i look up the OWLv2 system requirements, and it says that firefox isn't supported. for god's sake, they're partnering with national geographic, can they please be at least somewhat consistent? in case i was wrong, i try to log in via chrome. it says that i'm unable to sign in. that is the only thing inside the error message. why am i unable to sign in? i know for certain that this is the correct password. looking up the error online, and there is absolutely no documentation. somehow these koala-brained morons have caused such a hyper-specific error that there is absolutely no documentation of it on the internet, and then decided to make it spit out the most good-for-nothing error message they could possibly think of, as if anybody with an IQ over 50 couldn't already tell that they were unable to sign in. i try to access technical support, you know, support.cengage.com, on firefox, and it shows me a completely blank page. it works on chrome, though. but, as everything on this god-forsaken website is, it leads to more issues. you need to log in to access the actual technical support part. can't log in? too bad, i guess. luckily, you can copy the link that you need to sign into. i paste the link into firefox, and i get redirected to a broken link on cengageorg.my.salesforce.com. i attempt to report the broken link to salesforce technical support and you will never guess what i have to do. ignoring the 50% of the screen that is taken up by an advertisement for AI slop, i create an account for salesforce. i try to log into that same page again, and it tells me that i have an invalid username or password. it wasn't even the account being recently made either, i tried to log in again as i'm writing this and it still doesn't work. there is also no option to delete your account. i have exhausted every single path given to me, and i have absolutely nothing to show for it, sans a salesforce account that i don't want. all i'm wondering is... how? how does one run a collection of websites this horribly-made? how has this not become a cautionary tale yet? all student discussion of these websites is just hate. the only reason they're still in business is because they're part of a triopoly in the textbook publishing business. they have a 1.1 on trustpilot. i just don't know how one could operate a website that sucks this much without immense regret. how do you fall asleep at night, michael hansen, knowing that this company you own creates something so unbelievably and objectively bad? i am an atheist for the sole reason that an all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful god wouldn't allow this website to exist in this state, let alone be assigned for schoolwork and contribute to a class' grade. to every single person who has helped create this two-headed calf of a website, eat shit. thank you.

Its just a completely awful website, the auto-save is non exsistent, I close my computer for 90 seconds and the entire window i used to do my work wipes it all because i was inactive for 2 minutes. Not to mention the interface is horrible too, ugly and cluttered. By far the worst "learning" site ive ever used. If I could go back and time and never use Cengage again believe me I would do it with zero hesitation. Awful website, do better.

The software marks you wrong for no reason all the time in the excel courses. Doesn't matter if you get the right result, if you press the buttons in any order other the that exact order it wants you get a zero.

Two solid years using Cengage books. No more. I rarely give 1-star reviews, but they've absolutely earned it. If you want an experience that's cumbersome and locked down to the max, choose Cengage.
• Timeouts and relogging in is frequent. You can't change it, you can't extend it.
• Copy-paste functions are a mess and fairly restricted. If you like wasting precious time typing out full sentences or paragraphs for note-taking, choose Cengage.
• Search functions seem to work about half the time.
• No offline reading. Internet or you're screwed.
• Extremely limited printability.
• Odd formatting between devices, not always readable.

Instructions do not match the material, copilot has been integrated into the computers you are doing things on and the instructions have not been updated meaning the options you need to find are moved or combined into different categories. Will make you sit through a install of windows instead of speeding it up. Crashed when installing the windows on the server in the lab when I attempted to resume where I was at started it over. It takes hours and hours to complete the labs for the week.

Horrible software, yet all the old farts insist on using it for some reason. It often glitches out, has unclear questions, the auto grading feature is horrible, and the "servers" (for whatever reason there needs to be servers for something like this) often go down unexpectedly. I dont know why college professors still use it, its horrible.

There will never be straightforward questions or solutions that are given neatly. Everything, and I mean everything about this textbook will make you want to pull your hair out.

Wish I could give negative one million stars ridiculous that I have to pay for a book that I wont even use to do my own homework on top of paying for my course super shady and wrong especially for people who may not be able to afford it.

This textbook never works; every time I try to open it, something is never working, and there is nothing I can do to access it. They don't give any alternative method to access the textbook or offer any reason. This bug is also never fixed.

I would rate it zero im a college student who is using this for a class and let me tell ya cengage info is useless as well as not accurate with the added bonus it likes to reformat and edit assignments you have to upload for it so your guaranteed not to get above 90 or even 80 sometimes

If I could give it 0 stars, I would. Save your money and literally go to any other website

I wish I had read Trustpilot reviews before using this company to order a book I wanted. Absolutely shocking service and customer support. I am still waiting for a book that I ordered weeks ago. I have had to place the order twice and have sent multiple emails to try and find out when I might receive the book. When chasing customer service for a shipping update I have just been given random excuses and shipping dates. I am still waiting.....

I realize that the company doesn't want their textbooks pirated... I get it. But their answer to that is to make the textbooks as difficult and cumbersome to access as possible.
So, punish 95% of the users because 5% were doing the wrong thing. I just... can't... with this company.

When you naviage to the virtual labs, it says you can pick up where you left off if you have to stop while in progress. It didn't save my progress and wiped out all the work I did on the lab.

Then it takes forever to do the labs because the environment is sluggish and slow to respond to clicks. Most of the time you can't scroll down the page of the simulated OS using the mouse wheel. The scroll bars often disappear and you have to waste time clicking back and forth from the left side of the page with the assignment instructions to the right side where the simulation is. Any dip at all in your connectivity speed and it freezes up. As a result, it takes forever to complete assignments. It tool 3 HOURS to complete an assignment that was supposed to only take an hour!

The online book is too laborious and time-consuming. The partial pages that have content where you have to click the plus symbol to expand the page is inconvenient. Why don't they just print the whole page?

My college is pulling away from Cengage, but not soon enough. I will be glad when they put the software where it belongs: in the trash!

The way that this system grades papers is completely unfair. Not to mention, most of the instructions given are usually incoherent and make little to no sense. Put the cherry of a particularly bad teacher on top, and the results are absolutely infuriating. It's almost like it encourages instructors to be lazy by giving them the complete blueprint. I'm so glad this is the last class I have to take with Cengage, MindTap, or this particular instructor. It'll be a cold day in hell before I ever reference or recommend any of them.

Tl;dr charged twice for e-book and customer service refused to refund.
I enrolled in a discount book program with a strict opt out period, the first day of class, so I stayed opted in. Start of my class, my textbook wasn't available despite dozens of attempts, so I bought the textbook directly, to ensure I had access to my course material to begin studying and completing assignments imminently due. I get email from my school of me getting charged through the discount book program, so I emailed customer support to refund given the course was paid for twice. Customer support declined to refund.

terrible company, noting is ever up to date or working, doesnt matter how many times i call support they can never get this terrible companys website to opperate properly. overall hope the company magically blows up.

Worst website I've ever used.