It's not just you. About half of students who take college algebra end up with a grade below a C, and that number is even worse for students taking it online instead of in person.
One student on a college forum put it simply: "I don't get why. This is my third time taking it. I can't even stay in school. They'll make me take a break for a year." That's a common story, not a rare one.
If you're working 20 or more hours a week while trying to keep up with MyMathLab or ALEKS, the platform doesn't care that you're exhausted. A small typo can burn an entire attempt, and most of the frustration in these courses comes from fighting the software, not from the actual math being too hard.
Failure rates for these gateway courses vary a lot by school, sometimes 10 percent, sometimes over 40 percent, but the pattern is the same everywhere: a huge share of students who fail aren't bad at math, they just ran out of time or got tripped up by formatting rules.
If you decide to get help, be careful. A lot of cheap services take payment upfront and then disappear, or use overseas writers whose work doesn't match your usual writing style, which can raise red flags with your professor. Look for tutors based in the US who let you see a real graded assignment before you pay anything.
Waiting until week five to ask for help usually means paying full retake tuition later, which costs a lot more than getting support early. The smarter move is reaching out as soon as you notice you're falling behind, not after the damage is done.
