ALEKS-COLLEGE ALGEBRA MY STORY 8/2018

[cookderosa]

Frankly, I'm surprised ALEKS even pursued renewal with ACE, but I don't think this new change is unreasonable. I think it would have been a turn-off for customers for their initial assessment to be proctored, so there had to be something added somewhere to improve the integrity of the product. Since >70% or better on the initial assessment granted credit, there were obvious flaws in that system which were exploited by customers. They had to stop that from happening.

Finishing 70% of the pie is reasonable- I would think (though I'm just guessing) that a person should still see a big benefit from doing well on the initial assessment- if you've passed something, it should be filled in on your pie. For someone like me who might score 4% on an initial assessment vs someone scoring 80%, we wouldn't be starting wtih the same pie - at least I would HOPE not.

[shadowgem]

The ACE Knowledge check was excruciating. It took me 2 hours and 41 minutes to complete 30 questions. It was full of questions that I never went over throughout my entire course with ALEKS. I only had previous knowledge of about 10 questions, but most of it was new material. It was terrible but with patience, critical thinking and using my best judgement , I somehow passed.  

Great job at making it through that! And ty for the additional information. With so much of the new final exam potentially containing uncovered course material, I wonder if they allow retakes if you don't do well on your first attempt. If not, would it be better to complete the entire 400-500 course topics before taking the ACE final exam just to be sure you are actually prepared for it?

[zzzz24]

I have an active membership and switched between courses to do an initial knowledge check and re-quested another knowledge check, nothing I see brings up an "ACE knowledge check" or anything anywhere to use a lockdown browser...

Curious if your subscription was a personal one or through an actual school?

[Mspeachy]

I have an active membership and switched between courses to do an initial knowledge check and re-quested another knowledge check, nothing I see brings up an "ACE knowledge check" or anything anywhere to use a lockdown browser...

Curious if your subscription was a personal one or through an actual school?

Personal 

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The ACE Knowledge check was excruciating. It took me 2 hours and 41 minutes to complete 30 questions. It was full of questions that I never went over throughout my entire course with ALEKS. I only had previous knowledge of about 10 questions, but most of it was new material. It was terrible but with patience, critical thinking and using my best judgement , I somehow passed.  

Great job at making it through that! And ty for the additional information. With so much of the new final exam potentially containing uncovered course material, I wonder if they allow retakes if you don't do well on your first attempt. If not, would it be better to complete the entire 400-500 course topics before taking the ACE final exam just to be sure you are actually prepared for it?

Thank you. That would be my suggestion. 

[Merlin]

Hey guys, just wanted to confirm that this is definitely new. I've taken ALEKS College Algebra, College Algebra with Trigonometry, Trigonometry, and Intro to Statistics. None of these courses prompted me to download anything to make sure I had no other programs running in the background.

I just finished Trig and Stats right before the renewal kicked in and didn't have this requirement either. But it sounds like they just started requiring this within the last week or two.

Some things that I think should be clarified: 
You do have to complete 70% of the pie. 
Scoring 70% on the initial knowledge check doesn't mean you've completed 70% of the pie.
The "eligible to take the ACE knowledge check" part is rather confusing if you haven't used ALEKS. To sum it up, you "learn" topics and then you "master" them.  The knowledge checks test you on your new learned material and then adds more coverage to your pie if you master those topics in the test. The ACE Credit Knowledge Check is new, but probably very similar to the old knowledge checks.

Not to be disagreeable, but you don't (or didn't) have to get anything in the pie to earn credit. The pie represents your progress in the course, but the only thing that matters is the initial assessment and knowledge checks.

In my example, in my initial assessment, I earned an 86% in Trigonometry and a 94% in Intro Statistics and had them both placed on my ACE transcript right then. I didn't complete any of the pie within the course itself. But I spent a month studying using Khan Academy and other free internet resources before I signed up for ALEKS.

The results of your initial assessment (or latest knowledge check) technically represents the percentage of material mastered. So, if you don't get at least a 70% on the initial assessment, then the pie represents your current mastery percentage plus anything you've learned in the ALEKS course materials. The stuff you learn doesn't become mastered until you show mastery via a knowledge check. You need to show 70% mastery, or better, to receive ACE credit.

Of course, it now seems like you have to get 70% or better via knowledge check and then request an ACE knowledge check on top of that using the lockdown browser to get credit. That's really annoying but is basically like taking two knowledge checks back to back. If you can do one you can probably do two.

I hate the 3-hour limit. There is no way I could have completed the assessments in that window with my dyscalculia. It also sounds like you're not allowed to use your own notes for formulas or your own calculator anymore either, which would have killed me as well since my math issues cause me to forget or get formulas confused, among other things. So I have to refer back to my notes a lot and double or triple check my work when running through calculations. Stats had less formulas so that helped a lot in my case, but there is no way I could have passed trig I'm pretty sure.

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I have an active membership and switched between courses to do an initial knowledge check and re-quested another knowledge check, nothing I see brings up an "ACE knowledge check" or anything anywhere to use a lockdown browser...

Curious if your subscription was a personal one or through an actual school?

You don't have to switch courses to request a knowledge check. You can do it from the master account. When you bring up the views that show the students progress (there are two of these, it's under the first one if I recall) at the bottom of the page there is a button that allows you to request a new knowledge check. I would imagine the ACE knowledge check request would probably be there as well.

[zzzz24]

I know, I was just switching courses to see if something different would come up, but it did not.

I didn't want to ruin any progress on the current course I was doing by requesting another knowledge check while I was still doing the initial.

I haven't seen anything that shows these new requirements playing around in it.

[Merlin]

I know, I was just switching courses to see if something different would come up, but it did not.

I didn't want to ruin any progress on the current course I was doing by requesting another knowledge check while I was still doing the initial.

I haven't seen anything that shows these new requirements playing around in it.

Maybe it matters when you subscribed? Perhaps, if you added your current subscription before the new policies kicked in it doesn't affect you yet? That would make sense considering the contractual nature of the agreement.

[zzzz24]

Hmm, possibly, I hope that is the case! I signed up in early August though...

I had them reset my initial knowledge check a couple weeks back to try it again from scratch.

[zzzz24]

Reading their PDF, the webcam portion seems to be separate for schools that have that as a subscription or something, so it sounds like just the browser is now necessary?

[zzzz24]

I PASSED!!!