What are Course and Unit Mastery?

Khan Academy’s mission is to offer a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. In order to move toward this mission, one of the things that the Khan Academy team provides is a system to track students’ learning progress in all courses, all devices, and in many languages. We call this the Mastery System.

Course Mastery

Courses that have Mastery enabled show: 

1. The percentage of the course that you have mastered.
2. The overall fraction of mastery points for that course that you have achieved.

Courses also have a Course Challenge card at the bottom where you can take an assessment that covers a sampling of skills from the entire course.

Unit Mastery

The Unit page has several elements, which are labeled in the image above:

1. The total Mastery Points available in this unit (for example, 1900 points on this unit— 100 for each skill in the unit)
2. Under Practice, you can also see your progress from Familiar to Proficient to Mastered for each skill.

 

Practicing to Level Up in Skills and Mastery

When you start an activity (exercise, quiz, unit test, or course challenge), you’ll see a card that quickly shares information about how many questions there will be. If they're working on a quiz, unit test, or course challenge, they'll also see roughly how long it took for other students to answer them.

You’ll also see a card after you’ve finished an exercise, quiz, unit test, or course challenge. On the left, you’ll be able to quickly see how many skills you’ve leveled up or down on, as well as how many skills remained at the same level. On the right, you can find a detailed description of each skill level change.

This card may also recommend lessons for you to take based on your performance in the questions.

Skill Levels in the new Mastery System

Each skill is worth a total of 100 Mastery Points. As you practice skills and answer questions in quizzes, unit tests, and course challenges, your level for that skill will go up (or down, if you miss any questions in the course). 

Moving to Familiar will earn you 50 of the 100 points. Leveling up to Proficient will get you to 80 points. Become Mastered in a skill to collect the total 100 available Mastery Points.

Mastery is not easily earned, and that’s intentional. But putting in the work to achieve it will prove you’ve earned (and learned!) it. We hope those of you in the Mastery system will enjoy leveling up your skills and reaching 100% Course and Unit Mastery.