When I switched our son over from 5th to 6th in ALEKS, his initial assessment showed him 85% complete for 6th. This made absolutely no sense to me, as I assumed that there'd be more new material than that to which he'd not yet been exposed. He's a smart kid and all, but c'mon.
Ah, that's interesting. Was 5th the first level he did, or did you experience different behaviour on the switch from 4th to 5th, say? [ETA: ah, you answered this upthread, sorry. So the question becomes: did you see the same behaviout of the system at each level switch, or did you see the same as I did that it prefilled the pie between 3 and 4 but not between 4 and 5, or what?] If you look at the topic lists, basically the list for level n is a subset of the list for level n+1 at least up to 6th. So it does make sense that if someone gets 100% on level n they have a pretty filled pie on level n+1. Our experience was mixed, though: when I switched DS6 from 3rd to 4th, he got an automatically partly filled pie, but when I switched him from 4th to 5th, he had to do a new initial assessment, which didn't have nearly enough questions to "spot" how much he already knew, and so he ended up having to redo a lot of topics. I'm not sure why the difference happened: in both cases, as far as I recall, he got 100% on the final assessment and then I switched him in the same way. This repetition has a lot to do with his frustration with ALEKS lately, so I'm keen to get the partly-filled pie when we switch him to 6th. (I'd be quite happy to call it a day with ALEKS, but DS is determined he's going to finish 5th, do 6th, and then do high school chemistry! We'll see.) I had actually promised DS that when he gets to 90% done on level 5 I'll email the ALEKS people and ask about this - but an alternative would be to assume it'll just work, and secretly log in as him and do the missing topics if it doesn't work, I guess :-)
Incidentally I'd disrecommend having your DS go in as a new student and do the assessment: if you think about it, regardless of how much information they have about the dependecies, it's not plausible that they can test knowledge of the 266 (is it?) topic of ALEKS5 in one assessment. The assessment may work in checking what kind of level to start at, but it can't possibly be reliable at the level of finding small holes, when it starts from scratch as opposed to from a history of what the student has done.
