Comment by tptacek
4 hours ago
Isn't this more or less true of the whole undergraduate college calc syllabus? Like, I had the same thought grinding on trig integrals: "these problems seem super artificial", and I gather they basically are, and I guess closed-form solutions to arbitrary random integrals all sort of are? But that's not Math Academy's doing, or any kind of "teach to the test"; I went through these same problems with both my kids as they did STEM degrees at Illinois, and that's the actual material.
Mathacademy is meeting a market demand, which mostly seems to be being good enough to solve problems in several standardized math courses. In that regard, I think it is a thing that I would prescribe to any student (along with tutoring and study groups) in order to do well in that course.
But I am just not convinced it can ever (especially, in isolation, which you never claimed) lead to you being a good mathematician in the sense of having internalized the material. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it is similar to the feeling you get when you are some high level in duolingo and realize you still can't follow daytime soaps. You have the rigid intelligence, but not the fluid (internalized?) one.
Oh, I have no idea if it can help make someone a mathematician. But that's not why engineers study math, right? It's still extremely valuable to be able to do, and to an operational extent understand, advanced math.