As a Mastery-Based course, you need multiple opportunities to show you have not only attempted a concept, but have understood the concept. Compare this to a traditional course, where you cover dozens of concepts and only need to show you partially understand some of them to pass. This leads to a foundation riddled with holes that eventually cannot support new concepts. In this course, you are allowed to fail. Failure is natural and is part of the learning experience. Thus the exams in the course are built and graded knowing that:

• You may not master something on your first opportunity;
• You can learn from your failure;
• Everyone will work at different paces through the material; and
• Everyone will need specific feedback so they can learn from their failure.

Multiple Opportunities to Master

During each exam, you will test on 4 different concepts. You will get 4 opportunities to take exams, resulting in 16 mastery attempts. There are 12 total concepts for you to test on. Mastering 11+ sets you up for an A, mastering 9-10 sets you up for a B, and mastering 8 sets you up for a C. Even the very best students are given room to fail and not have it negatively affect their final grade in the course.

Mastery versus “Just Enough” Learning

As the first course in the sequence to Calculus, this course is meant to build and solidify the foundation you need to succeed. Every topic we cover contributes to this foundation - there are no “unimportant” topics. Compared to a traditional course, we cover less material at a deeper depth.

In a traditional course, you are graded on your success with content. It is reasonable that students then focus on earning as many points as possible, and thus focus on the easiest concepts while avoiding the more difficult concepts. This leads to a foundation riddled with holes, one that eventually cannot support new concepts.

Self-Paced Course

Students learn at different paces. This is difficult to achieve in traditional courses with lecture components as these courses continue to push forward with new material. Moreover, many students coming into this course may have taken Algebra 2, Precalc, or even AP/IB Calculus (and didn’t pass). Everyone has wildly different backgrounds, and so this course is built to allow you to move at your pace, whatever that pace is.

The Progress Exams will thus be customized to your progress in the course. By the third exam, there will be 495 different exams a student could be taking based on their progress. To deal with the tremendous number of possible exams, all exams are multiple-choice.

This does not mean the exams will be easy, however. A great deal of research was done to build multiple-choice exams that can identify errors and misconceptions just as well as a free-response exam. While the computer generates the correct answer, it also generates 3-4 of the most common student errors or misconceptions associated with that specific problem. The coordinator also developed a method to prevent students from working backwards from the options to guessing the correct answer. This was done for the students’ good as it allows you to get customized feedback on each of your exams!

Customized Feedback

Each Progress Exam will give you feedback on what you got right, but more importantly will give you insights into why you got certain questions wrong. As mentioned, the exams generate the 3-4 most common student errors or misconceptions associated with the specific problem. So if you, say, did not distribute correctly, an option would be associated to that issue. When you got back your exam, you’d see you choose this option and know what you need to do to improve for the next exam.