ALEKS Online Chemistry Assessment

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ALEKS Online Chemistry Assessment and Tutoring Service

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Welcome to the RIT School of Chemistry and Materials Science. To help support you in your academics at the College of Science, we have incorporated the ALEKS online chemistry assessment and tutoring service into your coursework.

ALEKS Overview

ALEKS stands for "Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces" and is a research-based, online learning tool that includes assessments and practice modules for almost 200 topics covered in CHEM 151 - your first-year General Chemistry course at RIT. After quickly and accurately determining your current knowledge, it helps you practice the topics you need to work on. ALEKS is a personalized way for you to learn at your own pace.

Your work in ALEKS will contribute to your grade in CHEM 151. We urge you to complete the work this summer, as it will place you in a much stronger position to start your career at RIT. However, if you do not complete the work before the start of classes, you will need to do so during the fall semester.

Get Started

You'll complete an initial "placement" assessment. It contains 20-30 chemistry questions. You may not know how to solve all of them, and that's ok. The idea is to find out where you are now and where ALEKS should help you learn. There's no grade and no reward or penalty for how you do.

Next, you'll enter the Learning Mode, where you work on areas YOU need to strengthen. Your path - how you will get from your present state of mastery to the mastery expected in the course - will be unique to you. No other student will have precisely the same experience. Fortunately, you won't be wasting your time with the material you already know, nor becoming frustrated with the material you're not ready to learn yet.

You'll study topics by doing problems in them. You'll have to do several problems in the same topic correctly for ALEKS to conclude you've mastered the subject. How many can vary, depending on what kind of mistakes you make, if any. The fastest way to be awarded credit is to be methodical and careful.

You'll also have access to learning resources. You can ask ALEKS to show you how to solve any problem you're given, in every detail. ALEKS will then ask you to solve another, similar but not identical, problem on your own.

  1. Go to www.aleks.com
  2. Click on Sign Up
  3. Enter Course Code: UVENM-HCJUN
  4. Confirm that you are in the right course (CHEM 151 Fall 2022 at RIT).
  5. Fill in the Registration information and be sure to save the username assigned to you.
  6. Purchase an Access Code for 52 weeks. This will be your textbook for CHEM 151 for the full year and costs $99.75.
  7. Complete your payment online and then you will be ready to use ALEKS!
  • Take the placement assessment seriously. Otherwise, you’ll end up in a section that is way too hard or wasting time on material you already know.
     
  • Trust the system when it assigns you work. Trust that this is indeed the work you should be doing now and that doing it diligently will build the essential mastery you need to succeed in chemistry as fast as possible.
     
  • Try to solve each new problem yourself before reading the Explanation. You may get it completely wrong, but you will become much more aware of what exactly is confusing to you when you try to solve it yourself.
     
  • ALEKS puts a real premium on solving a problem perfectly. Be sure you take the time to list units correctly and completely, answers rounded to the correct number of significant figures, names spelled correctly - not a single, small, careless error.
     
  • Don't cram your ALEKS work into one giant all-night session right before the deadline. You're going to get tired, and you're going to start making mistakes. ALEKS will then give you more work to do because it looks like your mastery is fading. Instead, log in every day and do a little work. Usually, 30 to 90 minutes are best.
     
  • Learn topics thoroughly the first time so that you can demonstrate your mastery of them any time, on any re-assessment, for the rest of the course.

If you run into errors in the ALEKS system or have other technical questions, contact ALEKS Customer Support or 800-258-2374. Describe the problem in detail and they will work with you to fix any technical problems as quickly as possible.