With only one day in between the Developmental Psych unit test and the Fall semester final exam, we were not able to give our usual week of re-assessment opportunities. The way we chose to work around that was to allow students to take the exact same 50-questions a second time during the same class period; in the gradebook, we recorded only their highest score.
This allowed students who may have narrowed their selection on a question down to two choices and then chose the incorrect answer the first time to instead choose their other – hopefully correct – response[1]. For most, this seems to be how the process went.
In Mr Joo’s classes, students were able to write down on scratch paper notes to themselves. When my second class period took their test, a few students had heard about that, and so they too took notes.
I would rather they not have done that, though. I would rather they have invested some cognitive effort in remembering what responses they had put into the first attempt and either kept those correct responses, or adjusted incorrect responses, for the second attempt. I think being forced to remember something, even if just for a short period of time, is better than not being asked to remember.
- Students were not allowed to look up answers in between attempts in their notes, their books, or online. ↩