Whenever a user answers to a question during a test quiz or an exam, the system estimates his level of knowledge on the basis of the question's difficulty and on the correctness of the user's answer.
The difficulty of questions is adaptively selected by the system to incrementally challenge the user among different tests.
Each question tests some specific skills. The system also estimates the user's knowledge on correlated skills.
For instance, if the user is tested on Amazon S3, the system infers his knowledge also on storage. Being an estimate, when the user will be tested on other services in the storage area - e.g., Amazon Glacier - the system will tune the estimated score on storage over time.
At the end of the quiz or exam, you will see your score result update for each category and the updated leaderboard.
Consequently, the user skill score might decrease or increase over time in accordance to the correctness of the user's answers.
Our skill profile product it's not exactly a point system based on experience,
but the aim is to assess the student skills, so we have a well-tracked profile on the skills level of each individual student.
We want to keep the score as realistic as possible across all users and all level of difficulties.
Here are a few cases that explain how the score is given:
- if you answer correctly difficult questions, your score will increase on the related topics.
- if you answer correctly easy questions, but your skill score is already high on the related topics, you will get no or very little additional points because the system has already assessed you are good on it.
- contrary if you answer wrongly to easy questions where your skill score is high, the skill level is adjusted by decreasing the score.