Khan Academy Math - 100% completion guide

Achieve 100% mastery in every single math course on Khan Academy.

I've always loved math, but when I was young I was a terrible student. It also didn't help that I had mediocre teachers and constant drama at home.

As an adult, years later, I decided to give math another try, and Khan Academy has been an awesome resource for me. It is great for self-paced learning and has a very nice "mastery" system that gamifies the process.

Below is a guide to completing 100% of the math content on Khan Academy.

How to learn math on Khan Academy

Khan Academy has a lot of content, structured in courses that are divided into units (which are often divided into sections). Each unit typically contains a set of videos, articles and exercises.

Progress is tracked in two ways:

Learning resources: Khan Academy tracks the videos you've watched and the articles you've read.
Mastery: depends on the completion of exercises.

The "learning resources" progress is straightforward, and not very important overall. Don't worry about it. If you feel like you need to watch a video or read an article, do it. If you don't, don't.

Mastery

This guide will focus on the "mastery" system, which is much more interesting.

Mastery progress depends on points awarded by your mastery of each skill. Mastery is measured by completing exercises linked to a skill.

There are two ways to encounter an exercise for a particular skill:

Skill practice: a set of exercises focused on a specific skill. Typically around 4-8 exercises.
Quiz or unit test: a set of exercises covering multiple skills. Typically around 1-3 exercises per skill.

Typically, each unit section ends with a quiz, and each unit ends with a unit test. Additionally, there is usually a course challenge.

A skill can be in different states:

Not started (0 points): no exercises or quizzes completed yet.
Attempted (0 points): less than 70% correct in practice, or incorrect answer in a quiz or unit test.
Familiar (50 points): more than 70% correct in practice, or correct answer in a quiz or unit test.
Proficient (80 points): 100% correct in practice, or correct answer in a quiz or unit test when the skill was already Familiar.
Mastered (100 points): correct answer in a quiz or unit test when the skill was already Proficient.

Another way to level up Proficient skills into Mastered is to complete a "mastery challenge", which is a set of exercises for Proficient skills. You can only complete a mastery challenge once per day, for a specific course.

To achieve 100% mastery of a unit or course, you need to get all skills to Mastered level.

How to approach a course

If you're reading this, you're probably not at the beginning of your math journey. That means that there are probably some skills you already know.

Here's a simple decision tree to help you decide how to get started with a course:

Spend a few minutes looking into the curriculum. Check out the contents in each unit, skim through the articles and videos, etc.
Do you feel like you know most of the content?
- Yes: take the course challenge.
- No: familiar with some of the units?
  - Yes: take the unit tests for those units. If not familiar with the whole unit, you can take section quizzes.
  - No: just start from the beginning!

That should get you started. After that, this is how you can grind toward 100% mastery:

Identify sections or units with low progression. Go through the learning resources and exercises. Take the quizzes and unit tests. Try to get most skills to Proficient level, but don't worry about getting 100% of them.
Revisit skills that are not yet Proficient. Practice them until you get them to Proficient level.
Do mastery challenges often. Make sure there are multiple Proficient skills. If there are only one or two, it's worth it to get others to Profficient first.

Overall progression

For the first part of this process, you'll be revisiting some very basic math, which can be boring. However, unless you're very confident in your math skills, it's very advisable to go through the basic courses. I was surprised to find out that I had forgotten a lot of things, and that I had some misconceptions about some basic concepts.

Until things get more challenging, the best way to keep things interesting is to work on multiple courses at the same time (following the recommended order though!). Then, just keep jumping between courses, using the tips from the previous section, until you get closer and closer to 100% mastery.

Once you get there (around 80% of early math to 8th grade), the best path forward is to focus on one course at a time. However, I'd still not recommend trying to 100% a course before moving on to the next one. Instead, complete at least all of the theory, get to a decent mastery level for the course, and then move on to the next one.

Then, keep coming back to progressively get to 100% mastery. This is not only less boring (more variety!) but also a better way to solidify your knowledge, as you'll be revisiting concepts multiple times over time.

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