Pay, Pal: Quizlet Upgrade Co$ts
As of June 2022, Quizlet made some significant updates that will affect students everywhere. Quizlet Plus, the version of Quizlet that requires a paid subscription, now includes features that were previously free. Being that Quizlet is one of the most highly used online study tools in the U.S., with its website claiming every 2 out of 3 high school students in the country use Quizlet, this is big news for students.
Before the June update, the features for study sets under Quizlet Plus included extra text formatting options, photo uploads for flashcards, scan-in flashcards from notes, offline usage, extra progress tracking, no ads, and more. (Pro tip: If you are a free user like me, I’d recommend getting a free ad blocker so those tempting clothing ads don’t distract you while studying!) This list may seem like a lot to miss out on, but none of these extra tools were keeping students from having unlimited access to some of the biggest and most popular features, such as Test and Learn. Unfortunately, those were the features that were restricted to free users in the update.
Many free users previously enjoyed unlimited access to the Learn feature, which combines the Write, Multiple choice, and Flashcard features of Quizlet, as well as tracks the student’s progress throughout the study session. This feature is still relatively new as it came out over the past couple of years, and many students find it incredibly useful. However, the update makes it so the number of times a student can use the Learn feature on a specific study set is limited. If you’re not paying for Quizlet Plus, you get 5 free study rounds of Learn per study set before it requires you to pay.
Similar to the Learn feature’s new updates, the Test feature now requires a Quizlet Plus subscription for students to have unlimited access. A free user only gets one Test per study set.
While Quizlet has restricted the usage of some main features for free users, it has also gotten rid of a few things for every user. For instance, the study game, Gravity, no longer exists. In Gravity, terms and/or definitions would slowly move down the screen until the corresponding answer was typed into the search bar. The more answers typed in before the terms disappeared below the screen, the more points you’d have. As of the June update, this game is no longer available. Along with that, the Write feature is unavailable and has been absorbed into the Learn feature, which is limited for free users. Users may be confused as to why these changes were made. Quizlet claims that even if they are making up for it by making the Flashcard mode even better.
It will be interesting to see how these updates continue to affect students throughout this school year. While many students may feel like this is a disruption to their stubborn study routines, others may feel like the changes won’t be hard to get used to, as they are still keeping the core values of Quizlet available to free users and the features that no longer exist weren’t that useful anyways. Maybe Quizlet will get enough complaints to the point that they draw back these updates, or maybe they continue to make them stricter in the future.
