Exact Path Back-to-School Planning Guide

Pretty soon, the smell of freshly sharpened pencils and crisp spiral notebooks will be in the air as students once again head back to school! Whether you’re kick-starting a new Exact Path implementation or reigniting an existing program for the new school year, we want to make sure that you have what you need to satisfy any and all flexible learning environments.

Check out our resources for preparing your Exact Path account, exploring our favorite features of the program, learning from other successes, and discovering new enhancements arriving just in time for the 2022–23 school year.

Prepare Your Account for the New Year

There are a few initial steps you should follow to get your implementation off the ground. Our wonderful consultants and on-call support representatives can guide you through this process, but with the help of some how-to resources, you can also do it yourself. Start by taking the following actions using the short videos available on the Exact Path Getting Started Resources page.

1. Update your teachers, classes, and users: 

Each school year ushers in new educators, new students, and of course, new classes. While admins can adjust teachers and students in the system from the Administration Center, individual teachers have the ability to create classes. We also encourage educators to archive old classes to safely remove them from view without risk of losing any historical data.

2. Set your academic year and test windows:

Before you can get your students into Exact Path, administrators must first make sure that the new academic year is defined and test windows are set. If you have a multiple assessment account, follow these steps. Academic years allow you to group all data together to compare growth and progress throughout the school year. Test windows sit inside an academic year to define when expected assessment administration should occur. This process looks a little different if you are using NWEA MAP Growth data or Renaissance Star data to automate your learning paths.

3. Get ready to assess:

After your account is set up, it’s time to administer the assessment. Help students understand that they’re not expected to know everything on the test and that the purpose of a diagnostic is identifying every student’s just-right learning level. It’s also important to follow other best practices, such as allowing sufficient time and creating a quiet, monitored testing environment. Dig into these best practices and more in “5 Tips for Administering the Exact Path Assessment.”

4. Drum up engagement by launching a contest:

We love hearing about educators who use mastery Trophies and teacher Challenges to ignite student excitement in learning. You can use trackers, printable certificates, and maybe even a few prizes to develop a unique contest that your students will love. 

Explore Our Favorite Features

Turn your Exact Path implementation up a notch by taking an in-depth look at key program areas, combined with quick tips to success.

Diagnostic Assessments: The blog post “[Making the Case for Diagnostic Assessments] Using Equity and Efficiency to Accelerate Growth” and its accompanying video discuss the value of the Exact Path diagnostic and examine how it works. If you’re still deciding on your preferred benchmark tool, check this out to learn more.

Assessment Data: The blog post “5 Things You Should Know About Interpreting Your Exact Path Assessment Data” goes one step further into the Exact Path diagnostic experience to unpack five pieces of data and show the value they bring to measuring program impact and student success.

Trophies and Challenges: The blog post “Trophies, Challenges, and Trackers, Oh My: Engaging Students in Exact Path” shows how Exact Path offers meaningful engagement features that can help crank up student motivation. Make sure that you know how they work to support skill mastery and time-on-task—then download some of our free student and class trackers!

Assignments: The individualized learning paths are a critical component of the program, but Assignments also provide an important means by which to remediate, accelerate, or simply focus on a specific standard exactly when you need to. Learn more about how they can be used in Exact Path in the blog post “[Feature Focus] Exact Path Assignments.”

Knowledge Map and Current Activities Data Views: Monitoring progress in the learning path is critical to implementation success. Check out the video “Exact Path: Knowledge Map & Current Learning Activities” to make sense of your reporting options and capture ideas to take advantage of each report for more targeted instruction.

Learn from Others’ Success

We frequently have the honor of hearing from our terrific customers, and we’re always proud to share their stories. Learn from educators who have been able to successfully use Exact Path to accelerate growth and support tiered intervention.

In the blog post “[Teacher Testimonials] Inspiring & Accelerating Learning with Exact Path,” a 2nd grade teacher and high school math resource teacher provide two different takes on utilizing Exact Path for academic success. While Hayley Baker celebrates mastery via a class goal tracker in her elementary classroom, Deb Butko conferences with her high school students on the power of closing longstanding gaps in learning to unlock future success.

In the blog post “3 Teachers’ Simple but Smart Exact Path Implementation Strategies” we heard from three instructional coaches at Lake Weir Middle School in Summerfield, Florida, who developed clear goals, an instructional framework, and a fidelity checklist to drive buy-in and implementation success from the very beginning.

Stay on Top of What’s New

We’re constantly improving our programs based on your feedback. With these back-to-school releases, it’s clear that exciting features and functionality are not in short supply! Here's what's new in the 2023-24 school year.

This post was originally published July 2019 and has been updated for the 2023–24 academic year.