Element presets — Theta Docs

Audiology isn't one set of numbers. The same patient can be classified, masked, and plotted differently depending on whose conventions you teach — IHS, BSA, or a program's own house rules. A "Mild" loss might start at 26 dB under one scheme and 21 dB under another; interaural attenuation, occlusion values, the symbol set learners draw with, and the percentage cut-offs for a "Good" word-recognition score all vary the same way.

Element presets let your organization capture those conventions in one place. Instead of hand-adjusting settings on every new element, you pick a preset once and every new lesson in your org starts from it.

Element presets are an organization-level tool managed by instructors and admins. Learners never see this screen — they just experience lessons under whatever rules you've set.

"Theta" is the base

Theta ships with a complete, built-in set of clinical defaults — the values baked throughout the platform. This is the Theta (Default) preset, and it's the fallback whenever you haven't chosen anything else.

A preset you create doesn't replace those defaults wholesale. It overrides only the values that differ from Theta and inherits everything else. If your preset only changes the degree-of-loss bands and the symbol set, every other value — masking width, occlusion effect, tolerances — still comes from Theta. This deep-merge means your presets stay small and focused: you describe what's different about your conventions, not re-state the whole thing.

Because presets only carry their differences, a brand-new preset that you never edit behaves identically to Theta. You can clone Theta, change three fields, and trust the rest to stay current.

What a preset controls

A preset spans both global settings (taxonomy that applies across the org) and per-element-type defaults. You edit them all in one scrollable form, organized into collapsible sections.

Category	What it covers
Degrees of hearing loss	The classification bands — name, dB range, colour, and order (e.g. Normal / Mild / Moderate …). Drives how PTAs are labelled and coloured.
Audiogram symbols	The symbol set (ASHA and others) and the two symbol grids learners plot with — one for thresholds a response was obtained at, one for no-response thresholds.
Interaural attenuation — tested	The IA values that decide when masking is required and how it's scored, per transducer (supra-aural, inserts, circumaural) and for bone conduction.
Interaural attenuation — actual	The IA the simulated patient actually cross-hears at — governs cross-hearing behaviour during the test.
Occlusion effect	Bone-conduction occlusion values per transducer.
Equipment limits (no-response)	The maximum output levels per transducer and bone, i.e. where the audiometer runs out of headroom.
Masking & PTA	Plateau width, safety pad, interoctave threshold, PTA type (2/3/4-freq, high-freq), response variability, default transducer, default audiogram view, and console behaviour (SimuHear, CARL mannequin, simplified 1.5-channel console, inverted dB controls).
Speech IA	Cross-hearing and masking values used by the speech tests (SRT/WRS).
WRS	Word-recognition classification cut-offs (Excellent / Very Good / Good / Fair / Poor), word- and phoneme-level tolerances, default word count, and scoring mode.
SRT	SRT tolerance and the PTA-agreement tolerance.
Sound sensitivity	SAT, MCL, and UCL tolerances.
Speech in Quiet tests	Which of SAT, SRT, WRS, MCL and UCL a new Speech in Quiet element runs — at least one (SRT and WRS by default). Each element can change them at the top of its Design tab.
Tympanometry — normative range	The shaded "normal" box: admittance, pressure, ear-canal volume, and gradient ranges (one range, used for both ears).
Tympanometry — display scale	Chart axis limits and the fixed-vs-adaptive y-axis mode for new tympanometry charts.
Tympanometry — artifact	Whether a designed artifact clears on re-test or persists until the learner reinstructs the patient.
Speech in Noise	The default test a new element starts on (FastSIN, WIN or THETA-Bio), and for each test: whether it's scored or report-only, how the ears are tested, WIN's carrier phrase, and THETA-Bio's condition, SNR and category cut-offs. Each test also has its own default scoring, which a test starts from the first time an element opens it.
Hearing Aid	The steps a new element starts with — Selection and Verification, both by default; each case changes them at the top of its Design tab — and a default series for its aid. Then the steps' own settings: the series the learner can choose from and the written rationale (Selection); the tolerance, step size, probe tube, high-frequency roll-off and how wide the speech range is drawn (REM). The patient is always set per case.
Hearing Aid Fitting	What a new appointment's patient comes in saying — the complaints ticked in both ears of a new fitting appointment (Theta's: none — on a good fit the patient comes in happy) — your own custom complaints (How this patient puts combinations), and the ask cap at an appointment.

These sections mirror the same fields you'd see inside the individual element designers — see Audiometry, Tympanometry, Speech in Quiet, Hearing Aids and Hearing Aid Fitting for what each value means in practice. A preset is simply where you set the org-wide starting point for them.

Audiogram symbols: two grids

The symbol editor shows two grids of the same cells — each ear crossed with AC unmasked, AC masked, BC unmasked, BC masked, MCL, and UCL:

Response obtainable — plotted when a threshold was found.
No response — plotted when the threshold is flagged NR, in the designed case and in the learner's saved submission alike.

No-response symbols are picked from their own list, exactly like any other symbol; Theta does not take a response symbol and draw an arrow on it. That means a preset that marks no-response with a straight-down arrow, or with a glyph unrelated to its response symbol, can just say so. The seeded defaults follow the usual convention — right ear down-left, left ear down-right — and each cell is free to differ.

Change a response symbol and its no-response twin follows along, as long as you haven't already given that cell a no-response symbol of its own. Match response symbols re-derives the whole no-response grid, which is the quickest way to recover after building a custom set.

Where to manage presets

Open your organization's space and go to the Element presets tab. (Older bookmarks to the standalone clinical-standards page, and to ?tab=standards, redirect here.) The screen has three parts:

Default preset banner — shows which preset is currently your org default. If none is chosen, it reads Theta (system default).
Organization presets — the presets your org has created, and the only ones you can edit or delete.
Theta presets — platform-wide presets every organization can view, clone, or adopt as its default.

Each preset card shows a quick summary (how many settings it changes from the Theta defaults, and in which areas) and a row of actions.

Creating and editing

New Preset opens the editor with everything pre-filled from the Theta base. Give it a name (e.g. IHS, BSA, Australia), adjust only the sections you care about, and Save Preset.
Clone copies an existing preset (system or org) into a new editable org preset named "… (Copy)" — the fastest way to start from a preset that's close to what you want.
Edit changes one of your org presets. You can also view any preset read-only to inspect its values.
Delete removes an org preset. Anything that was pointing at it falls back to the resolved default — nothing breaks.

Theta presets are shared across every organization, so no organization can edit or delete them — they're maintained by the Theta platform team. From your Element presets tab you can view one, clone it into an editable copy, or star it as your org default. Clone first, then customize your copy.

Choosing your default

Click the star on any preset to make it your organization's default. From then on, every new element created in your org is pre-filled from that preset. Use Clear (use Theta default) in the banner to fall back to the built-in Theta values.

How a preset reaches an element

When you add a new element in the designer, Theta looks up your org's default preset and pre-fills the element's clinical settings from it — the degree bands, symbol set, and so on.

After that, the element owns its own values. The preset seeds the starting point; it does not keep editing the element behind your back. If you tweak the degree bands on one specific audiogram, that change is local to that element and won't ripple out to other lessons or back into the preset. Likewise, changing the preset later does not retroactively rewrite elements you've already built — only newly created elements pick up the new starting values.

Reset to defaults

On an audiogram element's Settings tab, the Classification & Symbols fields (degrees and symbols) are pre-filled from your org's preset and editable there, scoped to that element. "Resetting" a field means setting it back to your course/org preset's value — the same preset that seeded it.

Applying your presets to a lesson from the Theta bank

Every lesson belongs to exactly one organization. Lessons authored outside your org reach you through the Theta lesson bank — lessons Theta publishes for any organization to use. There is no organization-to-organization sharing.

You have two ways to take a lesson from the bank, and they behave differently:

Use deploys it into your course by reference. Theta continues to own and maintain it, so later improvements reach your course automatically. Your staff can't edit it.
Adapt copies it into your organization. You then own that copy outright and edit every element — including its clinical settings — like any lesson you wrote yourself. The copy stops receiving Theta's updates, and is badged with the lesson it came from.

So if you want a lesson re-authored to your conventions, Adapt it and edit it directly. When you copy, you can ask for the copy to start on your organization's preset: the same re-skin described below is applied once, at copy time, and the copy then owns those values like any lesson you wrote (see The Theta lesson bank).

The same choice appears everywhere Theta content is copied, and means the same thing each time — a lesson from the bank, a whole course from Copy from Theta on the Courses tab, or one lesson out of a Theta course. It is offered only once your organization has starred a default preset, because a copy you believe is on your standard must never quietly be on Theta's.

The course applied preset

A Theta course can carry an applied preset, which re-skins every case in it at attempt time without touching any case's designed values.

This is a platform-course lever only. Your own courses never take an applied preset — neither yours nor a learner's. Their cases carry your standard in the elements themselves, written there when each element was designed or copied, so a designer's deliberate one-off (different tympanometry norms to make a teaching point) survives instead of being overwritten at attempt time. That is why the course settings modal offers no preset for a course your organization owns, and why the choice that matters for Theta content is the one you make when you copy it.

On Theta's own platform courses, learners may additionally pick their own preset — from the Element preset selector at the top of the Theta space, from the course rail, or on their profile. All three write the same account-wide choice, so they always agree. When several are set, a per-course rail choice wins, then the learner's account default, then the course default; "Theta default (as designed)" clears it.

What an applied preset re-skins

A preset changes conventions, never the case. The patient's thresholds, the tympanogram's shape, and which tests a case asks for are the instructor's; a preset only restates the rules those are read under:

Re-skinned	Effect
Audiogram symbols	The symbol set learners plot with.
Interaural attenuation (tested and actual, tone and speech)	When masking is required, and what the simulated patient cross-hears. The two always move together — separating them would mark a learner wrong for masking correctly.
Occlusion effect, plateau width, safety pad	The masking levels expected at each frequency.
Interoctave threshold	Which interoctave frequencies become required. Newly-required frequencies are scored; frequencies the preset stops requiring are not.
Tympanometric normative range	The shaded "normal" box — and with it the expected tympanogram type. A case designed as Type A can legitimately grade as As under a stricter admittance floor.
Word-list protocol	Which WRS/SRT lists are used, the word count, and the expected presentation level. A designed score is snapped onto the new list's grid (a 92% can't be scored on a 10-word list), keeping its classification band wherever possible.

Deliberately not re-skinned: degree bands and WRS classification cut-offs (those are the answer to the profile and classification questions — moving them would make the case unanswerable), equipment limits and required-frequency lists (they change which thresholds are obtainable), response variability or the simplified console (case difficulty, not a norm), and SimuHear or CARL (they depend on the room the lesson runs in).

On a template case the values are regenerated under the new preset, so everything stays consistent by construction. On a fixed case the designed values are kept and only the expected answer is re-derived — so what the learner sees and what they're graded against never disagree.

An applied preset takes effect on the next attempt. Submissions already in progress or completed keep the rules they were taken under, so scores stay reproducible — the preset's name is stamped onto each attempt and shown as a badge during the submission.

At a glance

Theta is the always-present base; presets override only their differences.
A preset can shape audiometry, speech (SRT/WRS), sound-sensitivity, and tympanometry behaviour, plus the global degree/symbol taxonomy. (Audiogram configurations are a fixed list, not a preset setting.)
Manage them on the Element presets tab of your org space; star one to make it the org default.
New elements are seeded from the default preset, then own their values — editing a preset doesn't retroactively change existing lessons.
A lesson from the Theta bank is either Used (deployed by reference, read-only, stays current) or Adapted (your own editable copy). To change how a referenced lesson behaves for your trainees, apply a preset to the course.