Your ALEKS Learning Module displays the number of topics you’ve learned and mastered. To correctly interpret your ALEKS progress, it’s important to understand what ALEKS means by these two terms.

Learned

You’ve learned a topic when you can solve problems if you know what topic you’re working with. You may need to see an example or two before you can solve problems on your own. This is where everyone starts, but your new knowledge isn’t all that useful yet.

Mastered

You’ve mastered a topic when you can recognize it without having it pointed out to you, reliably solve problems without following examples, and retain your knowledge of the topic over extended periods of time. Mastery is what really matters in the long run.

In your initial placement assessment, you demonstrated your mastery of a large body of mathematics—you didn’t have any advance information about the problems, and successfully selected the right techniques and knowledge to use in solving those problems.

As your work in your Learning Module, you’ll learn new material, topic by topic. Occasional Knowledge Checks will assess your mastery of the new topics you’ve learned.