Element presets
Set your organization's clinical conventions — interaural attenuation, degree bands, symbols, tolerances — once, so every new case starts from your rules instead of the Theta defaults.
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 case 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 cases 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 configurations | The shape taxonomy learners pick from (Flat, Sloping, Cookie-bite, Notched …). |
| 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 (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. |
| Tympanometry — normative ranges | The shaded "normal" box: admittance, pressure, ear-canal volume, and gradient ranges. |
| Tympanometry — display scale | Chart axis limits and the fixed-vs-adaptive y-axis mode for new tympanometry charts. |
These sections mirror the same fields you'd see inside the individual element designers — see Audiometry, Tympanometry, and Speech in Quiet 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 (number of degree bands and configurations, plus coloured degree chips) 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, configurations, 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 cases 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
Inside an element designer, the Classification & Symbols fields (degrees, configurations, symbols) are pre-filled from your org's preset and editable in place, 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 Theta case bank case
Every case belongs to exactly one organization. Cases authored outside your org reach you through the Theta case bank — cases Theta publishes for any organization to use. There is no organization-to-organization sharing.
You have two ways to take a case bank case, 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 case you wrote yourself. The copy stops receiving Theta's updates, and is badged with the case it came from.
So if you want a case re-authored to your conventions, Adapt it and edit it directly. If you want to keep receiving updates but still have trainees test under your rules, leave it deployed by reference and set the applied preset on the course instead of on the case — see below.
The course applied preset
A course can carry an applied preset, which re-skins every case in it at attempt time without touching any case's designed values. Set it in the course's manage modal; it is the lever that works for cases you don't own.
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 ranges (per ear) | 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, audiogram configurations, 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), and response variability or the simplified console (case difficulty, not a norm).
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/configuration/symbol taxonomy.
- 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 cases.
- A Theta case bank case is either Used (deployed by reference, read-only, stays current) or Adapted (your own editable copy). To change how a referenced case behaves for your trainees, apply a preset to the course.