The Knewton Blog


GMAT course update: Improved concept reporting

Posted on November 3, 2010 by

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Our Adaptive Learning Systems are the heart of the Knewton GMAT course, and we’re always working to improve them. Recently, we released an upgrade to the way we report our student’s conceptual proficiencies. This change came out of several months of research on how our students learn, and we’re really excited about the ways it makes studying more efficient — and personal — than ever before.

If you’re in class now, you may have noticed that the number of concepts associated with the questions in your CATs, homework quizzes, focus lessons, and extra practice problems has grown. That’s because we refined our concept hierarchy and atomic-level reporting: basically, the way we track how you’re doing on all the component concepts tested on the GMAT.

What does this mean for you? Better content (written and video) and an even more complete picture of what you need to study. You’ll see a richer, more personal list of relevant concepts, deeper reporting on your strengths and weaknesses, and targeted content for 700-level scores.

Our new concept hierarchy is going into our next wave of adaptive learning tools and instruction, so you’re getting all our latest technology to help you raise your GMAT score.

Check out the new content, and let us know what you think! You can join your teachers and fellow students in the discussion at community.knewton.com.

Posted in Inside Knewton, Knewton, Product Updates | 4 comments



  • akash

    Hi This is great. One thing that will be really helpful and can be easily added is:
    if in a question multiple concepts are tested, identify which concept student got wrong. For example in “SC1 Homework” Question #10:

    The advisory board of a vending machine company has discovered that, within the past six months, many establishments had chosen sales of freshly made items rather than offer snacks from the machines; as a result, the company plans on removing machines from several malls and small offices.

    (A) had chosen sales of freshly made items rather than offer

    (B) had chosen sales of freshly made items instead of offering

    (C) have chosen selling freshly made items instead of offering your answer

    (D) have chosen to sell freshly made items rather than offering

    (E) have chosen to sell freshly made items rather than offer correct

    If someone has chosen C, he got idiom wrong but not the tense. So the concept shown should be idiom but it shows this concept in my queue:
    “has/have” plus participle describes an event that began in the past and is ongoing, Comparisons must be parallel

  • Chetem

    I would like to make a recommendation regarding quizzes. After completing a quiz, there is already an option to re-take the entire quiz; however, I would like to see an option that allows you to attempt more questions similar to the ones you got wrong on the quiz. Specifically, while you are looking through the answers to a quiz and reviewing the explanations for the ones you got wrong, there could be a button next to each wrong question allowing you to “Try more questions like this”, so that you could practice using the concepts involved until you are certain you understand them. Or, instead of being able to retake an entire quiz, you should be able to take a new quiz focusing only on the questions you got wrong on the initial quiz. I understand that this is the idea behind the Assessment and Reassessment quizzes, but I would still like to have the option to review many more questions for certain concepts that I find more difficult.

    • Sumit

      I completely agree with Chetem. Even if I review the explanations for the concept that I got wrong, it doesn’t help if I can’t quickly identify them during the test. The only way to be able to do that is to practice those similar problems after learning the material to reinforce the type of concept being tested and see if we understand it. I think Chetem’s idea would work nicely, or if that same “Try more questions like this” button was included in the concept pages themselves, then that would rock as well!

  • Vidyasagar

    Knewton kills it for me, when it presents solutions….”Correct answer” and “My answer” should not be tagged along with the options….when i revisit a wrong answer, i want to 2nd guess and choose another answer before I see the solution…Knewton gives me no opportunity to do that…Introduce this feature and unknown concepts will automatically drill down faster, else who cares!!!