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Ah, no, that's a misunderstanding. If you think about it, it couldn't possibly do that, in 25-30 questions, however well chosen, notwithstanding any over-enthusiastic marketing-speak that may exist on their website. It gives an initial approximation, that's all.

I didn't realize it only had that many questions. I thought it was more comprehensive. I think the support people may be not well trained-- one woman told me that the initial assessment was much longer because it was more comprehensive.

IME you need to get 3 answers right to master a topic, and then it gets reassessed once or twice in the review the next time you log in (my son hated that one, and ColinsMum showed me how to bypass it), and then once in the next assessment.

It might also show again once in a later assessment -- my son managed to screw up on one thing that killed a 3-4 topic dependencies strand -- but not that many times, since the assessments have about 30 questions, 20 of which testing the last 20 topics mastered and about 10 of which fishing back (review amongst previously mastered topics) and forth (checking for mastery on never introduced topics).

As the pie grows the likelihood of having a topic show up more than 4 times (3 for mastery, 1 for assessment) decreases.

Like ColinsMum there was a time when repetition was an issue for my son, as he slogged through stuff he didn't like and his tendency to make one careless error that triggered a spiral of frustration + more careless errors + more frustration led to... well, a lot of frustration. Skipping the next session review helped. Not letting him do more than 2-3 topics in a session helped more (and bigger topics help with that too).

What level did you start at? Have you considered moving him up the curriculum? All the elementary math levels include pretty much everything in the levels below, so he might get a better fit with the initial assessment (which, as mentioned above, cannot really test *everything* in a reasonable time frame).

The initial assessment is a bit longer (maybe up to 50 questions?) but not comprehensive by a far cry.

Thanks for the input. I started him at fourth grade, because 4B (end of fourth) is as far as we went in Singapore Math before, and I wanted to make sure he was solid before proceeding due to the long time without any math. I also chose fourth because of worries about mismatch between the scopes and sequence between SM and ALEKS; SM is not keyed to state standards while ALEKS is. SM is a good program but like all of them it has its quirks, for instance introducing exponential notation later than some.

I guess at this point what we're going to do is stay the course, because he's only got about 2-3 sessions left before he finishes the fourth grade review. Then we will probably stop ALEKS for a while in order to let him do other math and science stuff over the summer.

The half-formed math plan I made with the wife a while ago was this: finish up through fifth grade Singapore Math, and perhaps sixth, while adding enrichment, then go on to Art of Problem Solving. It may be that we don't need ALEKS after this year. No matter what, despite what I feel is a bit of a rough fit, I am glad that we used it to let DS go mostly at his own pace while slogging through some boring review. In an ideal world we wouldn't have had to remediate after such a terrible school year.

I no longer remember for sure about the earlier courses, but for the three DS has done most recently, I'm sure the initial assessment hasn't been significantly longer than the in-course ones. I want to say we've never seen an assessment longer than 30 questions; I can't say that with 100% certainty, but I am certain that initial assessments for the last 3 courses have been under 35 questions.

Your plan sounds good. FWIW (which may be something, as your DS sounds a lot like mine) we've seen a huge maturity jump in the last couple of years which has made AOPS-type stuff much more usable, and I certainly see that style of thing as the main ingredient in DS's maths at 8. I think the recent ALEKS courses have still added something, basically a low-fuss way to make sure he's seen a coherent bunch of stuff. Neither I nor DS would want to use it continuously, but he may do some more next year.

My DD's public school 4th grade math covered SM through about 3B; my recollection is that the age / grade difference is such that SM Grade X is most likely equivalent to US public school Grade X+1. So I'd call your DS a 5th grader equivalent.

If you look at the ALEKS placement recommendations (http://www.aleks.com/k12/course_products/recommendations), an advanced 5th grader should be in the ALEKS Lvl 6 course.

I'd guess your DS is placed possibly as much as 2 levels too low, which would explain both his rapid progress and his dislike of repetition. (FWIW, if I were placing my just-finished-4th-grader in ALEKS, I'd put her in Lvl 6. I've looked at the scope of that level, and she's familiar with the first couple of items in each area.)

Thanks to both of you. The paper on ALEKS was interesting (to DS too). If we do ALEKS after this I will definitely look towards higher placement with a keen eye.

we found alexs levels to be well below CTY/EPGY levels.

DD found AOPS Algebra 2 class fun and a little challenging, depending on what question Alcumus came up with...

It doesn't cover Conic Sections, though. If you are looking to test out of A2, don't assume all A2's cover the same material.