ALEKS assesses mastery of a comprehensive set of skills ranging from basic arithmetic up to precalculus, including trigonometry. ALEKS is an adaptive system, so the selection of questions you’re asked will be guided by the answers you’ve given to earlier questions. Questions cover material selected from a long list of topics from across the curriculum, and the first few questions may be too easy or too hard for you. You may be asked a few questions about material you haven’t studied yet. As the assessment proceeds, ALEKS uses your responses to construct a model of your “knowledge space”, and adapts the questioning to refine and validate that model. This process resembles an oral exam or job interview: ALEKS won’t spend much time on topics you apparently either understand very well or don’t know at all, reserving most of the questions for material for which you have incomplete mastery. By the end of the assessment, the questions should be challenging but feasible – ALEKS will be pinpointing the frontiers of your knowledge space.

Click here for a list of all the topics on the ALEKS placement exam.

You aren’t expected to know all of the material on the topic list, especially those from courses you’ve never taken. This is an assessment, not a final exam! ALEKS will adapt its choices of questions as you progress through your assessment, posing questions that push the boundaries of your mathematical mastery and avoiding topics that you seem to be unfamiliar with.

When you review on your own it can be hard to self-assess what you are actually proficient in when the content is familiar. You might accidentally skip over familiar material not realizing you have forgotten the correct procedures. ALEKS is designed to identify the concepts you have worked with before, but are a little rusty on or may not have entirely mastered, and help you review them in the learning module. ‘Cramming’ for your assessment won’t have much effect – a lot of theory and experience have gone into ALEKS’s adaptive algorithm, and it’s gotten to be very good at distinguishing rote memorization from conceptual understanding.