How TruePace Works
A guess is labeled a guess. Mastery is always earned.
TruePace draws one hard line: placement is the system's best guess at where a student starts, and mastery is a status the system computes from what she's actually demonstrated. No one can blur that line — not a teacher, not a tutor, not the student herself.
Four terms, used precisely
Drift in what these words mean is how two people end up disagreeing about the product while agreeing on every sentence. Here's what they mean, and what they deliberately don't.
Placement
The system's guess at where a student is, made without them proving it. Cheap, revisable, and always labeled as a guess.
Not: Mastery. Never mastery — this distinction is enforced, not just written down.
Evidence
A demonstrated result — the student did work, it was graded, the system recorded it.
Not: Anything a human asserts on a student's behalf.
Mastery
A per-standard status the system computes from evidence: not started → introduced → practicing → mastered.
Not: A score, a grade, or anything a teacher, tutor, parent, or student can set directly.
Stuck
Trying and not succeeding. Requires a real attempt — the small-group candidate.
Not: Not-started. A student who's done nothing is absent, not stuck — a different intervention.
How a standard goes from unseen to mastered
A student starts where she actually is
Placement produces a starting position across every standard in the strand — not one score, not a single grade level. It's a guess the system makes without a human setting it node by node, and it's always labeled as a guess, never presented as proof.
She works — assigned or self-paced
Teacher-assigned practice always counts. Self-paced practice counts too, when it's done inside her class — that boundary is derived from her enrollment server-side, not asserted by anything the client sends. Anonymous, public practice never counts.
The system grades it and updates mastery
Every graded attempt is evidence. Mastery for that standard moves only from evidence — never because a teacher marked it done, never because the student says she gets it now.
Her teacher sees the result, and why
The class view shows mastery per standard, per student — including students with no evidence yet, who never silently disappear. A student who's attempted a standard and isn't landing it is flagged stuck; the flag leads to an action, not just a color.
A teacher can correct a guess. She can't overwrite a demonstration.
Placement is a distinct, overwritable kind of state — if it's wrong for a student, it can be corrected. Evidence-derived mastery is not: once a standard is earned through graded work, no one can revoke it because of a bad day, and once mastered it doesn't quietly demote. This is enforced in the system, not left to convention.
Placement today works within a grade — a student working significantly below grade level can't yet be placed there automatically, because the curriculum data that would support it doesn't exist yet. We say so rather than promise otherwise.
See it on a real class
The teacher view is what all of this is for — mastery, per student, per standard, with a next action attached.