I just started at Florida Atlantic University and the math placement test (ALEKS PPL) was significantly harder than I'd prepared for. I ended up placing into MAC 1105 (College Algebra) when I was hoping to land in Pre-Calculus or MAC 1114. Not a disaster but it adds a semester to my math sequence.
I have a retake window in about 5 weeks and I want to take it seriously this time. ALEKS gives you a prep module after your initial placement and I've been working through it daily — about 45 minutes to an hour every morning. I'm around 62% mastery in the learning module right now and I need to hit roughly 75% to have a realistic shot at placing into Pre-Calc.
My weakest areas are rational expressions, polynomial operations, and function notation. Those showed up heavily on the initial test and I wasn't solid on any of them. I've been supplementing ALEKS with Khan Academy for those specific topics because the explanations click better for me. Has anyone at FAU successfully moved up a level on a retake? How much prep time did it realistically take?
I moved from MAC 1105 placement to Pre-Calc on my retake. I spent 4 weeks on the ALEKS prep module seriously — about 60-90 minutes a day — and went from 58% to 81% mastery before sitting again. It's definitely worth the time if you put it in consistently.
Rational expressions are worth a dedicated study block. They're not conceptually hard but they have a lot of moving parts and the ALEKS questions are unforgiving if your algebra mechanics aren't clean. Khan Academy's rational expressions unit is genuinely good for this specific gap.
Don't underestimate function notation and composition questions — they're all over the Pre-Calc cutoff level. I missed 4 in a row on function composition because I kept confusing f(g(x)) with g(f(x)) under pressure. Just being aware of that pattern helped me a lot second time around.
Placing into MAC 1105 isn't the end of the world, but I get the frustration. When I retook the ALEKS PPL the thing that actually moved my score wasn't grinding more practice problems. It was slowing down on the ones I got wrong and figuring out WHY the wrong answer was wrong. Like, was I messing up a sign? Forgetting to distribute? Half my "mistakes" were the same two or three habits showing up over and over, and once I named them they basically disappeared.
So my tip is don't just check the answer key and move on. Sit with the miss for a minute. The same trick helped a buddy of mine who was prepping for the free fau accounting competency stuff, he said treating wrong answers like clues instead of failures changed everything. Retakes reset your placement, so you've got nothing to lose. Give it two solid weeks of that and I bet you jump a level.