Rating in chess mentor

It seems to me that the rating is totally useless in chess mentor. Maybe it would make more sense to give a percentage of success for a course, like in school with A, B, C and D or F.

The rating makes sense if it would measure always the same activity (notice also the different ratings for bullet, blitz, standard or correspondence games).

But in chess mentor, let's say that a teacher makes a course over an opening I don't know anything about, and I just finished an endgame course, which gave me 2000 points, then I try the opening course and hypothetically I lose 500 points.

Now my new rating is 1500, but what is actually measuring? Not my knowledge of the endgame, and neither my lack of knowledge of the opening course I, actually, didn't know anything about.

Well, if the rating is supposed to make sure adaptive mode selects lessons matching your capabilities it makes sense to "keep score".

But yes, it might make sense to differentiate between topics (e.g., "strong tactician, weak in opening theory"). And I'd propose not to publish the users rating but - similar to your suggestion - at the end of a lesson just give a performance rating for the lesson, the difficulty of that lesson and whether your performance was in line with expectations, better or worse (equivalent to the rating change one would see currently).

The rating of lessons would have to be given in relative terms, I guess.

I disabled the "adaptive" mode and follow a course from the beginning to the end. Like you  rightly said, there are quite different courses, tactics, openings, endgames, middlegame, so quite an array of different ratings which are not compatible with each other.

I have a 2000+ rating in mentor. I thought this was just meant to make me feel good, like "keep going, you are learning!". I am really a 1100 or so player though, so the rankings are confusing.

I've been wondering at the silly ratings for some time now, and I just now noticed a key pattern.  I just lost 200 ratings points over a series of lessons where the scoring just wasn't forgiving at all.   Get a hint, make a wrong move, 22% for you, numbskull!  Then I started gaining points quickly in another series of lessons, even though I was making wrong moves and getting hints.  Huh?

The biggest determining factor seems to be the difficulty level of the lesson, although it varies a lot by who made the lesson too.  Lessons in the 1000-1600 range not only have a greater negative impact on your rating when you do poorly, they also have a much more strict "tolerance for errors factor" built into the lessons.  Make one wrong move in a 1400 lesson, you might get 50% at the end, and your rating will go way down because you did poorly on an "easy" lesson relative to your inflated rating.

On the other hand, lessons in the 1800-2200 range not only have a boosting effect on your score when you do well, but they seem to be VASTLY more forvgiving of wrong moves, hints, etc.  They make a lot of free moves for you, there are lessons where you can just randomly guess every possible queen move until you find the right one and still score 100%.  Hell, I just did one where the instructions said "Move the white king to e2" and that was the only move in the entire lesson.  100%  Wow!  I can reading!  Ironically, the more advanced lessons are the easiest to score well on.

This scoring setup is pretty ridiculous.  It's very distracting and irrelevant to anything in terms of how you're going to do on the board.  I think I have to side with the guy who started this thread, and a scoring system that bears no resemblance to your game rating seems appropriate to me.  (Same thing in Tactics Trainer.  I have an incredibly crappy 900 or something there now, because I fall for the time clock pressure and just make instinctive moves instead of thinking things through.  It's not that helpful, IMHO.  Hey, how can I sac my queen in under 43 seconds?)

Oh well, on the bright side, I find the more advanced heavy endgame dancing stuff is having a bigger impact on my game than all the rest of it put together.  If you're better at endgames than the guy you're playing, all you have to do is tread water and try not to drown in the middle game, and you've got fighting chances.  I've even done fun stuff like checkmating with two queens, and underpromoting to a knight to promote with check and keep the initiative.

tl;dr the scoring system is stupid, but Chess Mentor is highly useful

the funny thing is that you can reset and get your rating up to like 3000 be just doing all the hard lessons.