Our engineering team took a break from the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping frenzy to push a big app update, particularly to the student features of Personalized Practice and Review Activities. Highlights from this update include:

  1. Personalized Practice is completely rewritten both with the student user interface and backend engineering. We updated the setup view with fewer options and more conditional logic to make it easier to use. The backend is completely rewritten in Angular and results in significantly faster load times. Together with the new “Available Content” and “Test Unlocking” tabs, our goal was to reduce the amount of “no content to display” errors while making it easier to find the content you need.
  2. Available Content and Test Unlocking are new tabs within Personalized Practice that provide better insight into how many and what type of questions are available to the student to practice according to their subscription plan.
  3. Review Activities is also completely rewritten for students. A new feature is “Activity Logs” which allows students and their supervisors to see every activity the user has completed on the app including time stamps. The Activity Log is toggled on by default when students first load the “Review” page. In particular our goal with this feature is to better validate what work students have or have not completed.
  4. Passage Based Questions (PBQs) receive improved integration across the app. For example, now students can designate how many PBQs they want to see in personalized practice and what genre they want to practice. We also now calculate a PBQ’s overall normed difficulty; the PBQ difficulty is calculated from the average of the normed difficulty of each attached question. Unsurprisingly, PBQs across courses  are clumped toward the “5” level of difficulty.
  5. The Organization Course View is updated to include better students stats and the ability to manually inactivate students.
  6. Miscellaneous bug fixes include better support for the browser’s “back” button, restoring of personalized practice at the end of a lesson, and enabling user’s to see a student’s selections and comments from the quiz self-assessment form.

Learn more about how to use the updated features on our Help Desk:

Still to come this winter are a complete overhaul of the existing Assignments feature and the introduction of Piqosity Virtual Tutor 2.0 with Intelligent Remediation. Our Content Team is also still busily working on new premium video courses for the ISEE, ACT, and Digital SAT plus 12 full-length practice tests for the Digital SAT.