/practice is where a skill goes from "I have seen this" to "I can do this".
Every skill sits on one of five rungs:
Not started → Attempted → Familiar → Proficient → MasteredAnswering questions moves a skill up. The ladder is what the dashboard's mastery panel plots, and what "your mastery" means everywhere else in the product.
| what it is | |
|---|---|
| Mastery Challenge | targeted practice on the skills you are weakest at |
| Unit Test | cumulative across a unit — the only route that can raise a skill to Mastered |
| Course Challenge | samples the whole course, not one unit |
| Project | an applied build, e.g. "Build the founder's first balance sheet" |
The Unit Test detail matters and is easy to miss: grinding Mastery Challenges will carry a skill to Proficient and stop. Mastered is reserved for cumulative assessment, on purpose — it is the difference between recall in context and recall without it.
Re-practice replays a set you have already done, which is the right move after a gap rather than starting a fresh challenge.
There is no prerequisite diagnosis. Practice does not test what you already know and route you to a starting point. What it does have is adaptive routing within a session, per-item rationales, and a domain→lesson mapping that sends you back to the class that teaches the thing you missed.
That distinction has been overstated in marketing copy before. If you are writing about this, the honest claim is "it knows which lesson teaches what you got wrong", not "it works out what you already know".
There is a Reset my mastery (demo) control on the practice page. It does what it says, for the signed-in learner. It exists for demos; treat it as destructive.