I did call Aleks people and they never mentioned anything about the settings. I will try them again to ask your question. The teacher says she is not familiar with the program and has dropped promoting it. Aleks people told me it only takes an hour to get familiar.
Assuming your DS knows his username and password, it sounds as though it would be useful to have him log in at home where you can see what he's doing and see what's going on here. I have read around ALEKS quite a lot (research interest as well as a DS doing it) and haven't seen any sign that it has a mode other than the usual one where you pick a topic, answer a few questions on it, and get it on your pie. If it's just that all the topics currently available to him are easy, but he can't face doing the easy questions to show it, then someone needs to click on "do a new assessment now" or whatever the option is called, in the parent/teacher interface. Then the system will reassess him and give him a chance to skip over easy stuff.
