Understanding rungs
Rungs are Math Ladder AI's measure of work completed - every rung is a real step up the ladder, not time spent staring at the screen.
⚖️ The fairness charter
Rungs measure work completed - they are not engagement bait, and the system never uses them against you:
- Rungs are never taken away. No negative points, ever.
- A near-miss never zeroes your work. Miss two on a set and the rest still counts.
- Practice is never timed. Only mock exams run a clock, because real exams do - and extended time is available in Settings for anyone who needs it.
- A slip earns a retry, not a penalty. Wrong answers get a re-teach and a second attempt before anything is marked missed.
- Quizzes test what was taught. We never calibrate assessments beyond the material to manufacture difficulty.
- Retakes only ever add. Rediagnosing or testing out can gain you credit; it can never remove any.
1 rung ≈ 1 minute of focused work
Every task is calibrated so its rungs roughly equal the minutes of focused effort it takes a well-placed student. A 12-rung lesson is about 12 minutes of real work. That makes rungs comparable across everything: lessons, reviews, quizzes, and exam sections.
What each task earns
| Lesson | 6-20 rungs, scaled by the topic's difficulty - a limits lesson pays more than a times-tables refresher because it takes longer to do well. |
| Review | 4 rungs per topic, up to three topics interleaved in one task. Reviews are short by design - the spacing does the heavy lifting. |
| Quiz | 10 rungs after every six lessons, covering recent material. |
| Daily Challenge | 25 rungs for the one bonus problem posted each day. One per day, and a correct answer extends your challenge streak. |
| Challenge Rung | 4 rungs for stretching a skill you have already mastered, up to a daily cap. |
| Exam section | 15-40 rungs for timed AP, PSAT, SAT, ACT, AMC, MATHCOUNTS and Math Kangaroo mock sections. |
| Notebook | 2 rungs for redoing a question from your Mistake Notebook, 3 more for sealing it days later with a fresh one - mistakes literally become progress. |
The Climb: rungs → levels → ranks 🪜
Rungs don't just pile up - they carry you upward. Every rung you ever earn counts toward your Climber Level, and levels group into named Ranks you keep for life:
🌱 Apprentice → 📗 Adept → 🎓 Scholar → 🧠 Expert → 🏅 Master → 👑 Grandmaster → 🏆 Legend
Early levels come in a day or two; later ones are a real badge of honor (the climb gets steeper the higher you go, on purpose). Your dashboard always shows how many rungs to your next level and how many levels to your next rank.
Gold Stars ⭐ - the mastery you can't grind
Rungs measure the climbing. Gold Stars measure the height gained - and you can only earn them by proving real learning, never by putting in time:
| ⭐⭐⭐ | Master every topic in a unit |
| ⭐⭐ | Score 90%+ on a timed mock exam |
| ⭐ | Seal a mistake in your Mistake Notebook |
That's the honest split: no one can farm a Gold Star by clicking through lessons - a star always means a skill truly owned.
Rungs are effort; mastery is separate
Completing a lesson always pays its rungs - the work happened. But the topic is only mastered at 75% or better on its practice, and only mastery unlocks what's built on top. So you can't grind rungs past understanding: rungs measure the climbing, the knowledge graph measures the height actually gained.
No wasted rungs
Because review credit ripples down prerequisite edges (working a hard integral is practice of the algebra inside it), you're never asked to spend rungs reviewing something you just used inside a harder problem. Nearly every rung you climb is at your learning frontier - which is why a steady 30 rungs/day compounds so quickly.
Goals, streaks and rest days
You (or a supervising adult) set a rung goal for each day of the week in Settings. Hitting every scheduled day extends your streak; days set to 0 rungs are rest days and never break it. The weekly total drives your estimated course-completion date - at 150 rungs/week, the dashboard shows exactly when your course lands, and the Pace Planner shows how much sooner a faster pace gets you there.