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.
[D]id you see the same behaviour 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?
I went back to my notes and I remember now having the pie coming up after 4->5 level change, but not 3->4. I thought the 4->5 pie was an error and requested a new assessment.
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.
Yup. I don't see anything from L5 that is not included in L6.
Whole numbers stays the same with 79 topics in both L5 and L6, with identical content. Everything else gets reshuffled (adding a handful of topics to each slice), with the only new category being Probability.
The bottom line is that of the 324 total topics in L6, my son got "credit" for the 266 topics he mastered in L5 (automatically 82% of L6), plus a few other things that he already knew, which gave him the starting point of 85%.
The ALEKS rep I spoke with said that she routinely has the faster students move from L4 to L6, skipping L5 entirely because of the extensive (total?) overlap.
Overall, I'm still pleased with ALEKS with respect to my son's advancement and mastery from L3->L6. He really enjoyed the pacing, and so far everything is "sticking."
EPGY starts on 12/1, and after comparing the course detail between ALEKS & EPGY, there's more than enough new material to warrant him starting with Grade 6 @ EPGY.
