Cracking ALEKS: 90% Initial Assessment College Algebra

[iwant2stalku]

I strongly dislike Math. I'll be the first to say I don't want to do more of it than I have to. ALEKS seemed like a quick and easy (AND CHEAP!) way to rack up some Math so I signed up two weeks ago.

My first ALEKS was Intro Statisitics (which I knew nothing about). I forget what my initial assessment was-I think it was about 45%. It only took me four assessments to pass, but I fought the ALEKS system for a solid week to complete enough pie progress to assess out of it. Then I took Int. Algebra as easy elective credit and passed the initial assessment using Algebra I remembered from high school 10 years ago. Got it done in a day while watching tv. Scored in the low 70's.

I was really nervous about College Algebra, a TESC requirement. I had taken a college level math class many years ago (not algebra per se, but lots of graphing and equations, much of which I don't remember) and did not know if TESC would accept it as the Algebra credit requirement. Tried emailing their advisers days ago, still no answer. I took the initial assessment (31 questions) and the questions seemed pretty easy. I used mathway a lot for my assessment like others on the forum suggested. Skipped a few word problems that looked hard.

I scored a 62%, which doesn't sound that bad. Until you pull up the pie and realize that their College Algebra is 514 topics. 514 TOPICS???!! So if it takes about 5 sections to earn about 1% of the class, I'd need maybe 40 ish pie lessons to reach my 70%. I did four lessons, checked my progress, and sure enough I was at 1%. I looked at the lessons on my pie and saw many topics that I was familiar with that were ON my initial assessment. My next thought was that I must've bombed my assessment. I started wondering if I'd made a couple stupid mistakes, landing me in ALEKS hell trying to finish 40 lessons + who knows how many assessments.

In a ballsy move, I deleted the assessment. Started over from scratch. And I think I've found a better strategy to taking an initial assessment with ALEKS.

I'm not about to start a debate about what qualifies as "cheating" on a non-proctored, untimed assessment. The truth is, this forum is full of motivated people that teach themselves how to test out of courses for college credit using available resources and it's not illegal. I read through the forum and I know there are some people that believe mathway and online calculators are enough to get you through. I now totally believe that those things can only ever work as TOOLS and may not be enough to pass an initial assessment. ALEKS isn't stupid. Shortcuts may get you some easy lower level answers but for courses like College Algebra, you won't get enough to completely escape a class. If you can't apply what you know to solve a word problem, you'll end up in the course. I gave some indication of that opinion on another thread as I was catching on to this. I also realize that some people enjoy the ALEKS course format. More power to you, I personally hate it.

My second initial assessment took me 2 days to complete. If I started to feel burned out or tired, I walked away from it. I treated it like an open book final exam. I did not skip a single question. I used a stack of paper to do problems by hand and I used google to search and study topics that I didn't know. I read through similar problems online and checked my answers using available resources like online graphing calculators before feeding the answer to ALEKS. And this time, the questions got progressively harder...a whole lot harder than my first assessment. I got into things the Mathway calculator can't touch. ALEKS started asking for answers in a particular format. Like "provide your answer as a log 10" "do not provide answers in decimal point format (ie wanting your root answer)" or "write as y=a(x-h)^2+k". At the end of the day, it's about knowing the material and this is one way ALEKS weeds out those who don't. This time I worked a little harder and scored a 90%, significantly better than trying to do it the easy way.

[cookderosa]

I'm not about to start a debate about what qualifies as "cheating" on a non-proctored, untimed assessment. The truth is, this forum is full of motivated people that teach themselves how to test out of courses for college credit using available resources and it's not illegal. I read through the forum and I know there are some people that believe mathway and online calculators are enough to get you through. I now totally believe that those things can only ever work as TOOLS and may not be enough to pass an initial assessment. ALEKS isn't stupid. Shortcuts may get you some easy lower level answers but for courses like College Algebra, you won't get enough to completely escape a class. If you can't apply what you know to solve a word problem, you'll end up in the course. I gave some indication of that opinion on another thread as I was catching on to this. I also realize that some people enjoy the ALEKS course format. More power to you, I personally hate it.

My second initial assessment took me 2 days to complete. If I started to feel burned out or tired, I walked away from it. I treated it like an open book final exam. I did not skip a single question. I used a stack of paper to do problems by hand and I used google to search and study topics that I didn't know. I read through similar problems online and checked my answers using available resources like online graphing calculators before feeding the answer to ALEKS. And this time, the questions got progressively harder...a whole lot harder than my first assessment. I got into things the Mathway calculator can't touch. ALEKS started asking for answers in a particular format. Like "provide your answer as a log 10" "do not provide answers in decimal point format (ie wanting your root answer)" or "write as y=a(x-h)^2+k". At the end of the day, it's about knowing the material and this is one way ALEKS weeds out those who don't. This time I worked a little harder and scored a 90%, significantly better than trying to do it the easy way.

It's not a debate, but to behave ethically, you are only supposed to use the calculator on screen when provided, so even using another calculator is technically cheating. Looking up answers on Google isn't allowed. I don't want to beat a dead horse, and none of us are naive; it is a non-proctored exam, but promoting how to beat the assessment? That should probably be kept to yourself imo.

[iwant2stalku]

To be clear, I'm not promoting anything here, only sharing my experience with the system for those that may be unfamiliar with it or to help someone that may be looking for a way to get a better score on their initial assessment. I'm not making myself out to be a moral compass. If I hadn't learned the material, I would have gotten the answers wrong and would've scored under 70. But that's not what happened because I studied the stuff on the assessment to pass it.

Plenty of people do it "by the book" and that's fine. But for me, even when I went through ALEKS statistics and used their explanations, I still had to use youtube and google, etc. to learn things that I didn't understand. Maybe that was cheating too. Maybe it's cheating to print the explanations and use them during the assessments, but a lot of people do that too. Heck, you could pay someone to take the whole class for you and probably no one would ever know. Again, not advocating just stating the facts of it. There's a lot of gray area between "by the book" and "paying someone else to take your class".

On my statistics assessment, I was asked to find the mean for a set of over 20 numbers with no ALEKS calculator. I used a calculator and I didn't lose any sleep over it. I know how to find the mean, I can add and divide. I didn't see the need to torture myself by spending that much time on a remedial level computation. I can only imagine how much pie you'd have to get through to make up for a stupid mistake in your long division because ALEKS thinks you don't know how to find a mean for a set of numbers!

[LaterBloomer]

One take away for me from your post is walking away from assessments, and taking a break. I kept pushing myself past when I was burned out, and the assessment showed it. I hate math. I hate ALEKS. I hate that you passes both stats and Col. Alg.

Oh, and I hate that ALEKS is so darn picky!!! I suppose it has to be. When you're in a class, and you submit your work, your professor might give you credit for the work you did up to your error. ALEKS isn't set up to do that, so I suppose it has to be rigid.