Books & Quizzes

In this blog post, we explain Accelerated Reader book levels, how they’re decided, and why they sometimes seem surprising!

The posters have gone up on the bus shelters. The pre-order has been made. The book has dropped on the doormat. The student has read it from cover to cover in a few hours. He has logged into Accelerated Reader and… there isn’t a quiz available yet.

We are often asked when a particular book will have a quiz made available for Accelerated Reader. Sometimes these are new publications, and the book is currently in our editing process. Other times, they are slightly older books that we haven’t yet come across. One way or the other, if we know that a book is highly sought-after in schools using AR we will make every effort to produce a quiz for that book.

While we make every effort to produce a reading practice quiz on the books that students are reading, from time to time we find that books are unsuitable for quizzing with Accelerated Reader. The reasons for this vary, but all centre on the fact that we never compromise on the rigorously developed and enforced standards on the quality of our quizzes.

Accelerated Reader uses the ATOS formula to determine book levels – a measure of the complexity of the text. But what are book levels? And what are they not? Our Managing Editor explains how they are determined and how they should be used in conjunction with other measures to ensure that students are reading books that are appropriate for them.

AR quizzes are available for several books that handle adult themes and use adult language. In this FAQs article, we look at why we produce quizzes for these books.

The license agreement for Accelerated Reader explicitly prohibits allowing students to take quizzes from home. There are two main reasons for this: one is to protect the integrity of quiz results and the other is to maintain the security of your Renaissance Place (RP) site.

In the first in a series of Frequently Asked Questions, we’re looking at one of the most common causes for enquiries from customers: book levels. How can it be that a chunky 300-page novel has the same book level as a picture book? Managing Editor Cecelia Powell explains why these apparent anomalies are actually demonstrations of the accuracy of the ATOS formula.