Four of the Tests that ship with Master Spell are intended for high school students, college students and beyond. They are progressively difficult commonly misspelled words. So that you don’t overwhelm yourself and so that you can start to see progress earlier, I have broken the 1,375 words down into four files.
Basic Words
Intermediate Words
Tricky Words
Difficult Words
I suggest starting with the Basic Words test. This test file contains over 300 words for you to concentrate on first. By concentrating on small sets of words you will be able to see your progress sooner.
Unless you are better than me, you will get words wrong. You should take advantage of the Trouble words tracking by occassionally selecting the “Troublers” tab in the History window. These are, at most, the last 50 words you misspelled. After studying these words, go for a drill on just your troublers by opening up the History window and saving your Troublers as a test and then choosing that test. See how you do.
Take a look at your graph window to see if you are making progress. I consider spelling mastery to occur when your drill score percentages consistently fall in the 95% - 100% range. The sounds at the end of drills and what Master Spell tells you will give you a clue as to how well you are doing. You receive the most enthusiastic cheers when you achieve score averages in this range.
Mastery Status
In order to achieve Mastery for a particular test, you must score between 95%-100% for a determined number of words within 10 drills. This number of words depends on the number of words in the test file.
Words in Test File Number of Words for Mastery
10-15 30
16-25 50
26-35 70
36-50 100
50-up 150
A progress bar is used to display what your progress is on accomplishing Mastery. The progress bar and the requirements for Mastery presented in the Mastery Status pane take into account that your 10th drill back will not count once you do another drill.
Once you achieve Mastery, the Print Certificate… button will become active and you can print your reward. This button will always be dimmed until you achieve Mastery.
Once you have mastered the Basic Words, you can start concentrating on the next test level. Master Spell will make the recommendations as to when you should move to the next level. You are always free to not follow the suggestions and try more difficult tests.
