Course/Unit Mastery feedback

I agree that the new mastery is too complicated. Here is an example of something I don't like, especially when compared to the old mission mastery system.

Suppose that in a particular unit, there are 14 skills, and the unit test contains 14 questions, one for each skill, for a total of 1,400 points. Now suppose that someone has taken the unit test until achieving 100% on this test and mastery in all 14 skills.

Now suppose that Khan Academy has added a new skill to this unit. Now, in order achieve mastery in the new skill, the person has to, first, get up to proficient in the skill through the practice exercise and, then, retake the unit test, now with 15 questions. Chances are good that the person may make a careless mistake and thus lose mastery in one or more of the other skills. (Relief can come if Khan Academy ever implements the much-requested reset option.) Then, that 15-question unit test has to be repeated, until 100% mastery is attained again.

Under the old mission mastery system, if a new skill got added to any unit in a subject, it caused the mission mastery for the whole course to decrease from 100%. To get back up to 100%,the person did have to do the practice exercise for this skill to get up to practiced or level one in the mission for that subject. And then the person had to so the Mastery Challenge. The Mastery Challenge consisted of 2-6 questions at a time. Depending on how many new skills were added for the course, or if any questions for the new skills were answered incorrectly, the Mastery Challenge may have needed to be done multiple times before getting enough questions on them to achieve mastery. Also, to fill out a full Mastery Challenge (2-6 questions), questions for skills already mastered were thrown in, but not as many as 14 like in the current mastery example. And, yes, mastery could slip below 100% if any of the questions for already-mastered skills were answered incorrectly. But getting back up to 100% in the old mission mastery system was a lot less stressful than the current system.

Couldn't have said it better, Regina, I totally agree. The current setup to master a single skill is very annoying.

I agree with y'all. Regina, that situation has happened to me too! I achieve mastery in a certain skill and yet it appears in the mastery challenge for whatever reason possessed it and I made a careless mistake and BAM! down a level 🤬 and believe me, this was ultra frustrating. When I went to the practice task to redeem mastery in that topic, I got all the questions correct 😁 (yay me) but I don't level up!!! 🤯 I don't understand... plz fix this! 😭

And yes, the mastery points and energy points are sorta confusing, but let me clear that up for you, Jett Burns. Mastery points are basically measuring the levels of mastery as you work on a skill: 50 for Familiar, 80 for Proficient, and 100 for Mastered. But that's as far as mastery points go. Energy points, however, are endless. They are earned by completing tasks/videos and when enough are accumulated,  you can unlock badges and avatars/backdrops.

Hope I helped 😊

Plus the Mastery Points suck because it is not tracked in any way on a timeline like the Energy Points.

So I cannot tell how my student performed in each attempted assignment or to see overall how they are doing each day over a longer period time.

I love the Mastery Point concept of going up or down but KHAN you have to add the same time dimension you did for Energy to Mastery Points.  I understand that this is irrelevant to the young students like Elementary and maybe Middle School but older students and their teachers need to see this metric in terms of time over days to see how the student is changing or progressing as they do the assignments or challenges they choose.

Training yourself to not make careless mistakes seems like a component of mastery.  Would you expect a master pianist to play the wrong note during a concert?  If you view the unit test as a concert, and the quizzes and exercises as practice then the system seems to make sense.  Being Proficient at something is not a bad thing, you certainly do not need to Master anything to be productive. If you want to put the work in to truly master something then you should want the bar to be as high as possible to validate the effort you decided to dedicate to whatever skill you are attempting to master.

I liked the missions, particularly the World of Math one. Students could all be working on the same mission even though some were doing early math and others Pythagoras. It also made the system feel like a game where the students had some control over what level they attempted next. The new system feels more like school and less like fun. Chasing energy points or even better, geek of the week badges instead of % complete is also a levelling thing, measuring effort rather than prior learning.

And who says that Khan Academy cannot Missions work on courses other than Math, such as making a World of Science, World of Art History, etc., just like was done for Math?

Khan has added new skills to 3rd-6th Grade Math and Algebra 1 and 2. Because of this, mastery is no longer at 100% or level 6 in these courses. When I finish AP Physics 2, I plan to get my mastery back up in these courses, but I dred taking unit tests with anywhere from 9-29 questions in each one to get this done. I would have loved to have just gotten Mission Mastery questions on just the new material, with perhaps a question or two from something I've already mastered popping up from time-to-time.