Hi parents - just taking a quick poll. Our high school has a test retake policy which allows kids to retake a test once and replace the grade if the retake grade is higher. Another school in the district reportedly allows unlimited retakes until you get to an A. At a recent gathering of freshman parents, one parent told the superintendent it was “unfair” that the 2 high schools have different policies. I was flabbergasted. This is only our second year at this school and I find it bizarre that there is a retake policy at all! Is this a normal practice? Am I the only one who thinks this practice is actually harmful rather than helpful?
Any test, every time?
We’ve had teachers offer credit for particular tests (generally when the grades were an overall bloodbath) - the kids could get half the difference between the retake and the original (for example, if you got a 70 on the test, and a 100 on the retake, you would get an 85 in the grade book). But it’s always been ad hoc - overall policy is you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.
Yeah, a teacher might do that very occasionally in our district, but it’s the exception.
We do not have an official retake policy in the HS district. But the teachers make discretionary rules, such as “drop the lowest quiz grade” or give extra points for correction, or bonus points question on the test. So theoretically it is possible to have a raw grade >100. Last year our district adopted a new weighing formula for Final course grade which benefits students who do not test well and penalizes students who did much better on the final exam than during the year. IMHO all of these tactics artificially inflate the grades.
Why does it matter? Students are judged by their peers at each high school.
So one school has grade inflation. So what? Unless you’re applying to a place like UoCinci or some other publics where they take a neanderthal view of GPA, any holistic evaluation college will look right past that w/o blinking an eye.
To me it’s not about the GPA. It’s about learning real world consequences of your actions. Have you ever had a boss who gave you a deadline for a project, didn’t like it and let you do it over and over again until she or he was satisfied? I haven’t.
No test retaking at all at my kids high school. You get what you get. Sometimes if the entire class does poorly the teacher may have offer an extra credit project to allow kids to earn back 10 points or something similar.
“Have you ever had a boss who gave you a deadline for a project, didn’t like it and let you do it over and over again until she or he was satisfied? I haven’t.”
Actually, in the real world bosses MAKE you do it over and over again until they are satisfied. Of course, sending something back over and over indicates some type of problem in communication or qualification. But C+ work doesn’t get presented or forwarded on.
At my kids’ schools, there are almost no retakes. Only if there is a situation that the entire class fails and the teacher re-teaches it so they can build on it for the next unit.
My corner of the “real world” has just-in-time deadlines. There’s no time for unlimited re-do’s.
Repetition Reinforces Retention?
Are there a number of kids with poor immigrant or less educated parents in this school district? Maybe the teachers/administrators want the kids to master the material and are giving incentive to lower-performing students to go back and re-learn what they didn’t understand in the first round? Maybe competence in the subject matter is the goal, rather than just inflated grades? Or, maybe there are state tests (like SOLs in Virginia), and the school district wants everyone to pass so the superintendent and schools look good? Or maybe a combination of both motivations: focus on student learning as well as test scores?
I am not necessarily endorsing the test policies in these schools. However, I loved it when English teachers sonetimes gave edited papers back to my boys to rewrite for a potential better grade. Otherwise, they would not have cared enough to read and learn from the teacher comments. Most graded papers were just tossed in the backpack to never be seen again! Without incentive, my boys probably rarely looked to see why they got the grades they did and how they could have improved their writing.
In my early career, I did have bosses who edited reports and sent them back for improvement. You learn pretty quickly to anticipate what the boss wants through this process. If you had to rewrite papers over and over again, though, you would probably get fired. Kids in HS might just need to move down a level if they can’t pass the tests consistently.
Yeah, @gettingschooled we must work in VERY different industries. My experience mirrors @PrimeMeridian.
You guys might like this story. My neighbor is CEO of a financial firm. He hired an analyst straight out of Stanford. The Stanford kid would get a specific assignment and use it as a guideline for what he created. When the CEO said, “This isn’t what I asked you to do,” the kid said, “Well this is how they taught me at Stanford and it’s better than what you asked for.” After a few months the CEO fired the kid, and the kid was reportedly incredulous. CEO told the kid that at his next job, he should do what the boss asks for correctly the first time.
" Another school in the district reportedly allows unlimited retakes until you get to an A. "
Rather than get in a swivet about a rumor, the original complaining parent should have asked for specific verification of that information. If there are differences between formal policies about re-testing at the two high schools would be something to address at the school system level, not in a PTA meeting.
I’m glad the Department of Motor Vehicles doesn’t have a “no retake” policy.
@happymomof1 the question was addressed to the superintendent at a freshman parent event, and he confirmed that the 2 schools have “different test re-take policies.” Swivet - now there’s a word I don’t see often!!
@Leafyseadragon. You haven’t answered my questions about the student composition of these schools and what the motivations of the superintendent might be. I am just curious, See my Post #10.
There are different educational philosophies. If you subscribe to the philosophy that the purpose of high school is to have students master the material then allowing unlimited retakes makes a lot of sense. If you subscribe to the philosophy that the purpose of high school is to give grades that measure one student vs another then it makes sense to disallow retakes.
At my D’s school classes that have a large component on convergent knowledge like math have weekly standards which are like quizzes. Students can retake standards as many times as they’d like within the time frame. Standards don’t really make up much of the grade anyway and the important part is actually being able to utilize that knowledge in the projects they have to complete.
My DD’s AP Bio teacher had a policy where you could take a test a second time…but they would average the scores. This prevented you from not studying, gettng a 0 on the first test and then going home, studying the specific items, and then retaking the test. The reason she allowed taking the test again is to promote mastery of the material.
Otherwise you might get a 79, not know the material, and keep going on in the class…and when other concepts build on one you haven’t mastered, you won’t do well in that either.
I think you will find that not every kid will want to take every test again…usually they just want to move on because you have more tests in other classes coming up.
I have seen it at my S’s school when the whole class performs poorly on an exam – re-tests were given at least once last year in an advanced physics course and in Honors Calc BC. I don’t have a problem with it in those circumstances.
I also don’t see an issue with allowing a child who has performed poorly to take a test one more time. I see this as more arduous for the teacher as another version of the test will then have to be created and graded. Not sure it should be standard operating procedure but perhaps an opportunity given when a student is really struggling in a course but the effort appears to be there.
How about take home open book tests? How do people feel about these?