Quest Ladder
TeachFORGE.ai
Quest Ladder / Diagnostic mode
Diagnostic mode
Find each learner's edge in a fraction of the questions a full ladder would take.
Stop when they stop coping. That point is the answer.
What it does
Diagnostic probes down the tree until the learner stops coping. Rather than working through every step, it moves through the ladder adapting to the answers, and stops when it has located the point where the learner's knowledge runs out.
The result is not a mark. It is a position: this learner is secure to about here, and this is where teaching should start.
When to run one
- The first week with a new class, where a syllabus assumption is a guess.
- A learner who has joined part-way through a course.
- After a long break, to see what survived.
- Before a revision unit, to decide what actually needs revising.
This is the most under-used mode in the product and the one with the best ratio of information to time. Twenty minutes of diagnostic at the start of a term saves weeks of teaching the wrong thing.
Its settings
Diagnostic has two of its own. Adaptive difficulty controls how sharply it moves between levels when a learner does well or badly. A node subset lets you probe only part of a ladder, which is how you diagnose one topic rather than the whole course.
The dose card matters less here than in other modes, because the mode is deciding how much to serve as it goes. What it draws from is the ladder you point it at.
Reading the result
Two learners can finish a diagnostic with the same score and be in entirely different places, so the score is the least useful number it produces. The useful output is per-learner and per-topic, in the class report and the student record.
The class report's skill view is the one to open: it shows what the class collectively knows, which turns a diagnostic into a teaching plan rather than a list of individuals.