ALEKS Math Placement Assessment (PPL)

How the assessment works

ALEKS PPL is adaptive and open-response, not multiple choice: it picks your next question from your last answer, and you work out each problem on paper and type in the result. McGraw Hill's system will not let you go back and change an answer once you submit it, and an on-screen calculator appears only when a specific problem calls for one — otherwise you may not use one. The pool behind the assessment covers a broad spread of precalculus material, from arithmetic through trigonometry, across 314 topics. McGraw Hill's standard package includes up to five assessment attempts and 12 months of access to a personalized Prep and Learning Module, and students who put in about six hours of module work raise their placement by at least one course on average.

Your score, and what colleges do with it

Your result appears the moment you finish, and it is not measured against a universal passing mark: each college licenses ALEKS PPL and decides for itself which score opens which course, so two students with the identical result can land in different classes at different schools. A handful of real examples, read from each college's own placement page:

Find your own school's placement page before you study — it is the only source that matters for your result.

McGraw Hill does not publish a single ALEKS PPL license price: colleges buy access and decide how, or whether, to pass on a cost to students, so many campuses fold it into enrollment or orientation fees and a few bill separately. Check your own school's testing or math-placement page for the number that applies to you.

The one dollar figure McGraw Hill does publish sits inside an optional exam-security add-on: if a school wants webcam monitoring on top of the browser lock every attempt already includes, it can charge students a flat $5 that covers every attempt for the term (see the FAQ below for what that buys and what the alternative is).

McGraw Hill's own page states the assessment is designed to reach a placement in 25 questions or fewer -- that is ALEKS PPL's stated design. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which also uses it, separately reports that its own students' attempts typically run to around 30 questions; that describes what UIUC's test-takers actually experience, not a different design spec from McGraw Hill's. Either way, the exact count is a side effect of how quickly the adaptive engine narrows in on your level, not a fixed length.

There is no fixed time limit set by ALEKS itself — your school sets the clock, and schools differ. The University of Kansas gives students a hard 2-hour sitting. Purdue asks students to set aside about two hours but gives a 48-hour window to finish once the assessment has begun, so you can pause partway through. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign expects one sitting but requires the whole thing wrapped up within 24 hours of starting. Whichever applies to you, plan for roughly 90 minutes of focused work — the average completion time the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's math department reports — and treat anything beyond that as slack, not a target.

Your school also decides whether — and how — the assessment is proctored; see the FAQ below for what McGraw Hill's own proctoring options can add.