A tutorial explaining to students the purpose and function of ALEKS Knowledge Checks (4:19).

Important Note about the Initial Knowledge Check (Read Carefully)

After you successfully signed up for ALEKS, you will be asked to solve about 20-30 problems (this will take you anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes – at any time you can logout and log back on, it will keep your place) to determine your background in math and chemistry before starting to work on the objective (HW assignments).
You'll get no help at all, nor should you try to find any. The idea is to find out where you should start learning, and you want ALEKS to adapt itself to you. If you get your friend, the chem tutor to help you, or do a lot of googling or reading the textbook, you'll just end up with learning that is way too hard and frustrating for your current knowledge, because you'll be missing important prerequisites. If you don't take the Initial Knowledge Check seriously, you'll just end up wasting LOTS of time on doing material you already know because you have to master all the topics by the end of the course.
Never click “I don’t know” button during any ALEKS assessment unless you really don’t have any idea of how to do the problem. Otherwise, ALEKS will think you don’t know a topic that you actually do know and take you back and make you “re-learn” them.

The Initial Knowledge Check is over the entire course, so you can expect to get problems you have no idea how to solve. Don't worry about that. This is a placement test, not a final exam. You're NOT going to be graded on it, and there's no reward for doing better or penalty for doing worse.