About the Adaptive category

Updated 11 May 2023

This information applies to courses that include Adaptive Follow-Up assignments. For information about other assignment categories (such as Homework, Quiz, and Test), see About assignment categories.

Like other categories in a Mastering course, the Adaptive category serves as a collection of default settings that are inherited by new assignments—in this case, by each new Adaptive Follow-Up assignment that you add to a Parent assignment.

The initial default settings for the Adaptive category are selected to emphasize learning. If you want to change Adaptive Follow-Up settings, you can do either of the following:

  • Change the default settings for the category to apply these settings for all new Adaptive Follow-Up assignments.
  • Edit settings for an individual Adaptive Follow-Up.

In addition to making it easy for you to apply settings consistently, the Adaptive category enables you to:

  • Weight Adaptive Follow-Up assignments differently to control students' final grades in the Gradebook and on the Scores page that students see.

    For example, you might want all Follow-Up assignments to be worth 15% of the grade, all Homework assignments to account for 20%, all Quiz scores to account for 45%, and all Tests to be worth 20%.

The Adaptive category is not included with every Mastering course. If you are using a textbook that provides Adaptive Follow-Up assignments, the Adaptive category is added to your course as you create assignments.

Other restrictions surrounding the Adaptive category are:

  • You can't delete or rename the Adaptive category.
  • You can't add a category named "Adaptive"; it can only be added automatically, as described above.
  • You can't change the category of an Adaptive Follow-Up assignment. A Follow-Up is always associated with the Adaptive category.
  • You can't add other assignments to this category. Only Adaptive Follow-Up assignments are associated with this category, and the association happens automatically.

See also: Add/Edit an Adaptive Follow-Up assignment | Scores for Follow-Up assignments