Cengage LearningReviews 

593
TrustScore 1 out of 5

1.1

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Review summary

Created with AI, based on recent reviews

Considering 72 reviews, most reviewers were let down by their experience overall. Many people found the website and product to be poorly designed, buggy, and frustrating to use, with issues like slow loading times, frequent shutdowns for maintenance, and an unintuitive interface. Customers also reported problems with accessing purchased materials, such as ebooks not loading or being inaccessible after a few months, and textbooks containing errors or missing chapters. The pricing was a significant concern, with many feeling that the cost for temporary access to digital content was excessive and exploitative. Customer service was frequently criticized for being unhelpful, unresponsive, and difficult to reach, often declining refunds even when issues arose. Some people also felt that the platform's grading schemes were unfair and specific, leading to frustration and difficulty in achieving high scores, particularly in courses like MS Excel. Conversely, a small portion of people felt that some customer service representatives were patient and went above and beyond to help them.

What people talk about most

User experience

Customers had negative experiences with user experience, citing numerous issues such as login problems,... See more

Product

Reviewers express strong dissatisfaction with the product, citing issues such as poorly proofread textbooks... See more

Website

Users describe negative interactions with the website, with many reviewers calling it "awful" and... See more

Price

Clients share negative opinions on price, with many reviewers expressing frustration over what they perceive... See more

Customer service

Reviewers highlight significant dissatisfaction with customer service, often describing it as shocking and... See more

Reviews shaping this summary

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

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 publis... See more

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Cengage is genuinely the worst platform I've ever used for learning. I'd rather crawl through 100 miles of broken glass than complete another cengage assignment. It's only used by lazy professors and... See more

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Absolutely horrible- tried to purchase their materials for my son. The prompt asks if youre a student- if you click "No" it automatically places you into an instructor account - then you have no way... See more

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Registered for online course 12-25. My state informed me the course is not accredited in my state on 1-6. Contacted Cengage and they refuse to refund anything. My local community college has this cou... See more


Company details

Written by the company

Cengage helps higher education instructors, learners and institutions thrive with course materials built around their needs.


Contact info

1.1

Bad

TrustScore 1 out of 5

593 reviews

5-star
4-star
3-star
2-star
1-star

No history of asking for reviews

This company hasn't invited their customers, so reviews may not be representative

Hasn’t replied to negative reviews

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1.1

All reviews

(593)

71 reviews in the last 12 months

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Rated 1 out of 5 stars

would not recommend

horrible ui, slow website, wrecked my grade and teachers literally can't do anything to help me because of this poor functioning website.

16 April 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

120 down the drain.

This has to be the biggest scam ever, in my 5 moths of using this stupid website there hasn't been a single day that it didn't have serious issues. Serious issues include having 20000 ping, VMs outright not working, screen going black randomly, getting kicked out of my session and sometimes losing progress. I have no idea how this website can remain this bad when people pay hefty price of 120 for it. I wish I could give negative 100 but I can't.

8 April 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Horrible

Horrible, filled with bugs, passwords that they give you for the labs do not work, super vague, unforgiving, instructions are horrible, no help when the program messes up.

29 March 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Horrible platform all-around

Videos walk through problems but don't explain why things are being done. Platform is slow and buggy. They force you to buy a textbook just to do homework on their platform. Scummy platform. I beg you: please avoid this. Stop forcing students into giving this horrible company money.

28 March 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

If I could give less than one star…it…

If I could give less than one star…it is expensive. The quality is inconsistent. Lab servers and directions will let you down and waste hours of your time. Cengage help is no help. Your college professors will not take on responsibility for Cengage content problems—so you as a student are screwed.
They need reprimanded or mandated for improvement.
I seriously hate this company. They have the entire market basically, and your grade could be affected by their sloppy -ness.

8 March 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

I wish I could chosen lower than 1 star!

I wish I could chosen lower than 1 star. Cengage doesn't deserve anything above 0 (F-).
I am quitting my Spanish class and am going to look for another educational institution that doesn't use the worst learning platform I have ever been put through.
I suspect that part of the problem may be Cengage guides teachers to setup the classes, but I still place all the blame on Cengage.
What a waste of my time.....

16 February 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Abhorrent

Literally doesn’t work on an IPad you can’t even sign in. Ridiculous I don’t know why this thing even gets used.

5 February 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

It's the worst program I've ever had…

It's the worst program I've ever had the displeasure of using. It's now required by schools to use this garbage software, I don't want to give this software any more money. It's not helpful, crashes constantly and never gives a valid explanation for any wrong answers.

2 February 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

I attempted to pay for my webassign…

I attempted to pay for my webassign textbook multiple time for my college class and had error messages pop up. I contact the help desk and they are terrible. I was put on hold many times. I was also hung up on and told to call back an hour later on two different occasions.

26 January 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Worst experience

They are horrible. I have had to use them for two different college classes and have had bad experiences both times. I bought an online code and wasn't able to access it. Helpdesk is horrible to work with and they are rude and unhelpful. It often won't even let me sign in to the page as well. They're also way too expensive.

20 January 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Disappointing textbook experience

I bought a Cengage textbook for self-study. Because I wasn't enrolled in a university course, I couldn't log in to the portal to access the associated resources. I reached out to Cengage, asking for access or, at the very least, answers to the chapter review questions, so that I could learn more effectively. I was initially met with a blanket refusal. I was then strung along for months, but the lead eventually went dead. This has been a super disappointing experience. I paid good money for this product in good faith, hoping for a good learning experience. Cengage denied me the full range of product benefits and hampered my learning.

16 January 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Absolutely terrible platform

Absolutely terrible platform. Schools need to find a better tool than this garbage. I will never recommend this to anybody and encourage every student that has to use this platform to reach out to there school administration. We have to do better than this junk!

6 January 2025
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

MindTap is actual garbage

Cengage learning and their Mindtap program is literal garbage. I had to use this terrible program for a french course and it was a needlessly arduous experience. This does not even speak to the fact that it was an overpriced purchase requirement that amounted to little more than a poorly programmed mix and match flash game. The questions are incredibly vague giving little to no indication toward what kind of answer they are looking for. The "grading" feels incredibly arbitrary as you can put in the same answer to yield different results. Then there is the frustratingly unintuitive mess of drop down menus that obscure which modules you have been assigned. Instead you will have to scroll through multiple headings and hundred's of assignments to find the ones you've been assigned for grading. Why is there no master list to show the assignments you need to focus on. Overall I am not surprised by the ongoing scam-ification of post secondary education and academic textbooks, but I am disappointed.

18 December 2024
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Frustrating and worthless for learning

I have had to use cengage for my math textbook this semester, and it has been very frustrating. The pre-calculus textbook for some bizarre reason, only has answers for every other question, which makes it useless for learning generally unless you go and check your answer another way. The answers also just say what the answer is, and don't make an attempt to explain why or how, which is annoying. While I'm not sure if that's cengages fault or not, I do know that it is their fault that I get signed out upon leaving the page I'm on every time, and have to sign back in. It's a MATH TEXTBOOK of course I'm going to be on one page for a long time. Overall, genuinely the worst online textbook I've ever used, and has caused me hours of anger.

Edit:
Alright its been like 2 minutes but I went back to study using this terrible website and got immediately angry so I'm adding more. The fact that people are paying for this is insulting. What I would consider the bare minimum of being a study material, having the answers, isn't there, only having the answers every other question is a joke. I also know it wouldn't be hard to explain how something is the answer, but that doesn't matter when you can do the bare minimum and just let students spend valuable time on other websites to get an explanation. The problems are also hilariously bad for studying, and often are super complex for no reason, seemingly just to waste peoples time, which makes me angrier. As I said earlier, worst online textbook I've ever used, you should be paid to use it, not the other way around.

Edit 2:
I'm back the next day, angry once again at having to use this terrible textbook. This time I'm specifically angry at how terrible the problems are. Despite me doing a REVIEW, I cannot do most of the problems in the review of stuff I have already learned even with help from other websites. This is exceedingly unhelpful, as I am trying to study for my FINALS, which as I'm writing this, are TOMORROW. I could fail and lose my financial aid, all because this textbook is so wildly terrible for actually studying and learning. Every time that I try to either do the homework or study using this terrible book, I spend far longer than I should, all because it is terrible.
There is no reason that the review problems are so needlessly complex compared to anything you would generally be doing in a precalculus class. All of this would be nowhere near as big of an issue if the book just explained stuff with the answers, but I guess that's just too much effort for whoever wrote it to put in. I'm convinced the person who wrote the textbook hates students at this point, they are bad at teaching math and should feel bad for putting students through this. Never use this website if you don't have to.

16 December 2024
Unprompted review
Rated 1 out of 5 stars

Bad Textbooks

The Precalculus textbook is lazy and lacks good examples. Sometimes it might be even completely missing information about how to solve certain problems.

3 December 2024
Unprompted review

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