The Cogniti agents

We have built a small set of Cogniti agents for this subject. Each one exists because it can do something a general-purpose chatbot cannot or should not: it holds course-specific knowledge — including things we deliberately keep from you, such as full worked solutions and pass marks — and it holds a teaching stance you cannot simply talk it out of.

1 How to use them

The agents run on the University’s Cogniti platform. Open the agent (links below), sign in with your University credentials, and start chatting. If you are new to the platform, the University of Melbourne’s Cogniti guide for students explains the basics. A few things worth knowing:

  • The agents keep no memory between conversations, so open each session with the context it needs (which exercise, which module).
  • We can see the conversations. This is deliberate: it is how we learn where the cohort is stuck. It is not a place for anything personal or assessable.
  • They are grounded in our materials, so they use our notation and conventions — one reason to prefer them over a private chatbot for anything course-specific.

2 Exercise Coach

Open the Exercise Coach → — sign in with your University account.

The flagship. Its job is to get you moving when you are stuck on an exercise, without sending you straight to the solutions — because the learning is in the attempt, not in reading the answer.

It works through a graduated hint ladder:

  1. Orientation — what are you actually being asked to find, and what are you given?
  2. Framing — which concept or method applies here, and what in the question signals it?
  3. First move — the specific first calculation or spreadsheet layout to try.
  4. Check — “your answer should be around X — does yours reconcile?”

The rule that makes it a tutor rather than a hint dispenser: you have to put something on the table before it escalates. It will ask what you got for, say, the development factor before it tells you whether you are on track. That is the difference between being helped and being handed the answer.

Two things worth knowing:

  • It won’t give you the solution. Ask it for the answer and it won’t hand it over — it is built to get you to the answer with graduated hints, one at a time, and it will ask you to try each step before it offers the next. The worked solutions are one click away on the website regardless; the point is that the hint path is faster and less painful than staring at a blank page.
  • It has different modes. By default it coaches you through a problem you are stuck on. You can switch mode by starting your message with a keyword:
    • MODE: review — you have finished the exercise and want your working checked.
    • MODE: build — you are stuck building the spreadsheet or model, and want help with structure and formulas rather than the underlying concept.
    In every mode it still won’t hand over a full worked solution.

Best for the tutorial and extra exercises.

3 Readiness Diagnostic

Open the Readiness Diagnostic → — sign in with your University account.

A roughly ten-minute conversation that probes the assumed knowledge you need before the subject gets going — the topics on the Prerequisite Knowledge page — and tells you where to review. Most valuable in the first fortnight. At the start you can choose to check your Excel readiness, your maths and statistics readiness, or both — pick one of the three buttons (or begin your message with MODE: excel, MODE: maths, or MODE: both).

Why an agent and not a self-marking quiz? A quiz shows its marking scheme and hands you a score — which tells you little about what to do next, and is easy to game once you can see how it’s marked. The Diagnostic keeps its pass marks and its “this mistake means you’re weak on X” logic hidden, so it can’t be gamed, and instead of a number it gives you a clear next step: which topics to go and revise.

4 More to come

We are finalising a further agent for the subject. Details will appear here once it is ready.

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