To follow up a bit: Alcumus is adaptive in a way that seems to work pretty well, once you realise that they aren't aiming to give you only problems you'll find straightforward! I don't think you need to worry about his settings; if he starts getting things wrong or giving up on questions, it will dial down the difficulty. It's normal that the same question counts for both Prealgebra and Algebra. I didn't remember that Counting was supposed to be harder than the other stuff, and honestly that doesn't sound right to me, though it's going to depend on the individual; but even if it is, there are plenty of easy questions in it, and it should give them to him if he needs them. Just for comparison, here's DS's crazy profile (hmm, can I do a picture here? meh, only if I put it on the web first, somewhere that won't break my anonymity):
[well, for now, imagine a very spiky profile, with islands of green meaning mastered interspersed pseudorandomly with islands of red which typically mean topics on which Alcumus has never asked him a question, in no particular order, with his level in Prealgebra far lower than his level in any other topic, because Prealgebra was introduced long after he first used Alcumus!]
DS is very inconsistent about using Alcumus (goes through phases of using it daily and then doesn't touch it for months), practically never gives up on any question or gets any question wrong (because I help if necessary - the 2 qs he's got wrong and 1 he's given up on relate to cases where I couldn't help, and I think include at least one case where the given answer was wrong, as well as at least one where we both made the same stupid mistake!). He did "follow book" Geometry once, while doing ALEKS geometry, but started half way through, so he has a lot more green at the hard parts of that than the easy parts. (He's now doing AOPS geometry - I'll post on that shortly - leading to the odd situation that this sets specific topics as homework, and he has already got all the hard ones from the end of the course but not the easy ones from the beginning! But he's still getting value out of them. I'm not sure whether he, in particular, is adaptively being given hard questions on the elementary topics, but I think there may be some of that going on.) More generally, sometimes he sets a focus topic but more often he just leaves it to Alcumus.
