Dear readers, what are your thoughts on the following situation?

A student takes a cumulative final exam representative of all the material covered in the course and scores a 42. This is a “high-stakes” exam in that the final exam score is the class grade. There are no other intermediary grades that will be averaged or otherwise factored into the course grade. The student claims that he really knew the material, but was just having a bad day. Do you write a new exam for the student to take and replace the previous exam’s score with the score on this exam, do you give the same exam to the student, or do you fail the student?

This is the scenario I want to consider. But before going down this path, let me first make an attempt to address the immediate questions / comments people may have.

• What kind of a course has the grading system you gave?
  

  Probably none or very few. It is definitely not traditional grading in the sense of here are six quizzes and five homework assignments and three exams all averaged together to give a number that means practically nothing. However, the vast majority of certification exams are exactly like this. One test, one score, pass or fail (and hence the question about whether to redo or not).

• Why are you even asking this question? The answer is ‘yes’, always allow students to redo!
  

  That’s exactly why I am asking this question. If you are in the immediate ‘yes’ camp, what counterarguments have you heard? Are they arguments about the ‘old system’ and how it’s oppressive? Are they arguments about how so many other things in ‘real life’ have second chances, so why not treat students the same way that the world works? If so, these are weak arguments — let me, hopefully, give you a better argument you can make.

• Hmph, students these days. There shouldn’t be redos at all. For starters, it’s not like the exam date, time, location, and content topics were a secret. Why didn’t the student just study the first time around? Secondly, it’s another layer of work for the teacher. And finally, it’s just going to lead to another type of memorize and regurgitate test-prep.
  

  While these points are not invalid, they don’t consider the myriad of outside, uncontrolled variables at play. If you are in the immediate ‘no’ camp, let me, hopefully, give you a better argument to make that’s not devoid of compassion.

Regardless of the stance you may have on this matter, I encourage you to read both sides of the argument.

Weak Argument In Favor Of Redos

The argument goes something like this, “There are all sorts of professional certification exams that people take in ‘real-life’. If a person fails that exam, they can just retake it again later. So why shouldn’t we allow students to retake class exams?” This is an interesting, but weak argument-by-analogy. And so, how best to counter an argument-by-analogy other than making another argument-by-analogy?

• Counter-argument #1:
  

  Let’s suppose you are taking a professional certification exam to be a teacher, a pilot, an accountant, etc. Let’s say that you fail that exam. But you get to retake it! So it’s not the end of the world. Yes, it’s not the end of the world, but you are inflicting pain on yourself in the form of lost time and money. These certification exams cost money and most of them are not offered “continuously”. That is, you can’t just take the exam again tomorrow. You will have to wait weeks or months and in some cases a full year before you can take the exam! This is not an efficient start to your career.

  That lost time can’t be gotten back. Additionally, if you didn’t have a job and you are working towards certification, you’re still out of a job! How are you feeding yourself? You can’t even reasonably begin to look for a job in the field of your choice, if you’re not certified. (I do, understand that for teaching, specifically, there’s alternate route, so the ‘time’ factor may be mitigated, but there’s still the cost of the exam, the fact that you have to go back and sit through the exam, have to explain to the school that you failed the first time around (that’ll go over well, right?), etc.)

• Counter-argument #2:
  

  The heart surgeon doesn’t get a second chance at that triple bypass and even if the patient survived it, they sure as heck aren’t going back to that surgeon. That sales pitch you’re making to a prospective client only gets one chance. The presentation to your company senior executive team about a new idea you have only gets one chance and probably less than 5 minutes. NASA doesn’t get to “redo” their space launch at no cost. If you weren’t charming on the first date, there won’t be a second one.

• Counter-argument #3:
  

  So you want to use the “real world” as your argument for redos, eh? Then, let’s just open ourselves up to the ole “slippery slope” type arguments … The real world ain’t pretty and nobody cares about you, your feelings, or your learning angst. So why not make school that way too? Wait, it is and that’s why there are no redos. That’s life. Suck it up. Grit. Yadda yadda yadda.

In the days when the Atari and the NES had come out, I remember hearing as a child, “There is no reset button in life.”. Actually, there is a reset button. But it can be really expensive to press. And some things in real life are just not redoable. How are you going to redo cracking an egg? The egg is cracked! It’s done! There’s no going back!

If you are pro-redo, I’d encourage you to try to make the argument below rather the argument about other exams in real-life that allow redos.

A Proper Argument For Redos

When being for or against something, it’s almost always helpful to define the context first. The context here is education. And a more refined context is: it’s a child’s education, a teenager’s education, an adult’s education, etc. Next, we have to define what it is we’re trying to do with our assessments and the grade we report.

An argument to make for redos ought to go something like this (assume teacher talking to student),

I want to be able to accurately measure what you know. Since what you know changes over time, the most accurate measure of what you know is the latest assessment. There’s no such thing as “average” knowledge. I don’t care if you score a 90 the first time you took the exam. If you take the exam a second time and you score a 70, then that’s the most accurate assessment of what you know. So retake the exam. Prove that you understand the material. I know that everyone learns differently and I want to give you every reasonable opportunity to learn and to demonstrate it. I’m not going to give you the same exact exam, but I’ll give you a different one because I want to measure what you know, not what you’ve memorized.

Of course, this argument assumes that the exam is comprehensive. If the exam isn’t comprehensive, then you may want to consider some type of averaging scheme. But that’s up to you to judge.

Ultimately, the argument is to keep the focus on measuring knowledge (don’t confuse this with only measuring facts). If you are so inclined, you can also argue that the traditional scheme in place, (averaging exam scores, e.g.) is not a correct way to measure what a student knows. And if you are using a traditional grading scheme, what is the purpose? Averaging exam scores couldn’t possibly be a measure for what a student knows because what a student knows changes over the semester. Averaging scores only gives an indication as to how well the student can keep pace. Is that what you’re trying to measure? If you want to measure what a student knows, use the most recent exam. And make that exam comprehensive; make all the intermediate stuff formative — get rid of the micrograding. Content mastery isn’t about mastering fifteen separate topics or memorizing a bunch of facts and algorithms, it’s about how well one can use those topics, facts, algorithms, etc. in concert.

A Compassionate Argument Against Redos

If you don’t want to offer redos, what is the rationale? Is it that it’s actually very difficult and time consuming to make a good comprehensive exam the first time around that having to do it again and again and again is just an unreasonable burden? Is it that the student should have a sense of responsibility and should have just studied properly the first time around? Is it that the student will eventually become overly familiar with the questions and that all this will lead to is the “test-prep” culture that we see with standardized exams?

I can agree and empathize with all these concerns. But here are some problems.

• There are health issues. I’ve had (and have) many students who (with a doctor’s note!) have been ill on or during exam day. How valuable is the assessment if the student isn’t healthy enough to demonstrate what he/she really knows?
• There are family issues. I’ve had (and have) students who recovering from the death of a loved one. For those of you who have never experienced a loved one passing away, suddenly or not, please reserve judgment. The emptiness is all-consuming. There’s no “grit” here to appeal to. This is a different type of wound that takes time to cope with and it doesn’t necessarily get easier with age either.
• There are financial issues. Again, past and current students of mine struggle with meeting basic needs. They work several jobs or their parents work several jobs. The resources at home just don’t exist for that additional learning time. The one resource that these students do have is the teacher. The teacher shouldn’t become yet another obstacle / point of stress by mandating a time, place, and location for the make-or-break exam.
• There are learning issues. Everyone learns differently and at different paces. Some students need to see the big picture first before working on the specific problems. Others need to work on all sorts of little problems. Still others just like to be thrown into the middle. Regardless, there’s no subject that’s beyond any student’s grasp. The only battle is against time and do we want to make 14 weeks the time limit?
• There are teacher issues. “I taught it” doesn’t translate to “You, the student, learned it”. You get the idea. Often times, the student’s first introduction to a subject is through a teacher. And teaching ain’t easy. So, let’s also recognize that while students’ certainly have their own share of learning responsibilities, a teacher won’t be perfect. There should be some forgiveness here. And that forgiveness can be a redo.

So where’s the compassionate argument against redos? It’s this: I can understand that it can be very difficult to make representative second, third, fourth attempt exams that won’t simply lead to the “test-prep” culture that exists with standardized exams. I am completely on board in that regards. In fact, I’m writing a second exam right now and it just takes hours to do and I’d rather spend that time thinking about something else related to my class. I also fully support, in principle, that students should take ownership of their own lives and education. Success in life is about preparedness (don’t get me started on the “you need to fail to succeed” arguments … a different post on some other day).

So how about this? If you don’t want to or otherwise find it insensible to offer redos, let the student decide when they are ready to take the exam. You are already allocating \(N\) class days for exams anyway. Just back-end those days. More concretely, let’s suppose, we have a class that meets three times a week for an hour each time in a 14-week semester. That’s 42 class periods. Typically, 7 or 8 of those classes will go to exams, quizzes, and reviews and the other 34 to “lecture”. So, think non-traditionally! Make the first 34 classes all about the material. Make the last 8 classes exams. You decide if you want that to be 8 comprehensive redo-style exams, or 8 possible dates for a student to take the exam once and only once, or some other arrangement. If you want to be / can be really bold, then let the student take the course exam next year if he/she wanted to!

Sound wacky? Maybe it is. But only because it’s not traditional in any regards. There are a lot of details that have to be fleshed out with “whenever” testing and I have many of them sketched out on paper. Once ready, I’ll write about that as well. In the meanwhile, if you don’t want to offer redos, then that’s fine. I just ask that you make sure that you’ve been able to account for the myriad of outside, uncontrollable, unaccountable factors that have nothing to do with education when assessing a student.