Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Taking the pretest does count as one of the fail attempts, so if a student fails the pretest, they will be required to complete all activities within the lesson before the quiz can be launched again.
For example, If the fail attempts are set to one and the student fails the pretest, an alert will appear in the Dashboard because the student has exhausted all fail attempts. An instructor will need to provide an optional retake to allow this student to take the end-of-lesson quiz.
Yes. The lesson’s content will be assessed on tests and exams regardless of whether the student passes or fails the pretest.
The system will automatically send the student back to the lesson’s activities, which needs to be complete, in order.
Caution
The Free Movement feature does not work well with pretesting because it sets the course to a nonsequential learning mode, allowing students to jump to different lessons without structure. With no structure to follow, if a student fails the pretest quiz and clicks on the Next Activity button, the system will send the student to the next lesson’s quiz rather than the lesson’s activities. Without the Free Movement feature enabled, the student will be moved to the activities in the lesson that was failed during the pretest. However, with free movement enabled, students need to take the effort to go back to the course map and proactively select each activity. Once the students clicks into the first activity, they can continue to use the Next Activity button at the bottom. Again, this is only an issue when pretesting and the Free Movement feature are enabled together.
Language Arts courses require students to engage in reading and writing and are not just about mastering skills. With pretesting turned on, students might no longer be required to write essays. Additionally, they could pretest out of lessons that required them to read chapters 1, 3, and 4 or an extended text and only be assigned to read chapters 2 and 5, which would result in a disjointed learning experience.
If students pretest out of a lesson, all activities in the lesson are removed. However, if a lesson has no quiz, it will also have no pretest. Lab lessons generally do not have quizzes, so students would not be able to pretest out of lab lessons.
The pretest feature changes the course structure by adding 10 questions to the beginning of each lesson. This pretest will measure the student's knowledge of the content, and allow the lesson to be skipped if mastery has been demonstrated. If the student passes the pretest at the predetermined threshold, then the system will automatically advance the student to the following pretest. If the student fails, each lesson will need to be completed in order then a quiz needs to be taken before moving forward with the course.
When students pass the pretest, that score counts as a quiz score and will be calculated into the overall grade. If the student does not pass the pretest, the pretest score will not count toward the overall grade, The quiz score at the end of the lesson will also count toward the student's overall grade. Students can go back at any time and review the skipped content from sections they tested out of. It should be noted that none of the scores earned on the skipped content will count toward the student's overall grade. These activities will appear as bypassed and will be in gray text.
Please note that a pretest uses one of the student’s assessment attempts, so educators may wish to compensate by adding an additional retake attempt in the Fail Attempts Allowed section of the Assessment Options page.
Unlike prescriptive testing, pretesting can be turned on or off at any point, regardless of whether or not the student has started the course.
Caution
Pretesting is not available or does not work on the following courses:
- AP World Language courses
- AP courses
- CTE- the project-based career courses
- eDynamic Learning courses
- NCAA
- World Language LMS
Yield
When students pass a pretest, those questions will be included in the test and exam bank for later in the course. Also, keep in mind that some lessons do not contain quizzes (such as project lessons). The activities in these lessons will automatically be assigned to the student to complete and pretesting will not allow them to skip these lessons.
To find out how to enable or disable pretesting, use one of the following links:
| Edit the Course Options for a Student | Edit the Course Options for a Single Course | Edit the Course Options for Multiple Courses |