On the AP-Chem listserv, Adrian Dingle remarked:
“I prefer pilots that ‘pass’ the test EVERY time they attempt to land an aircraft, not the second time they try.”
Personally, I’d rather fly with a pilot who has had problems and learned from them. Last January, there was a pilot in New York who safely landed a disabled plane on the Hudson River, enabling all of the passengers to get out safely. In an interview, the pilot said that he had years of experience recovering from various problems, and this experience taught him the quick thinking and decision-making that ultimately saved the lives of all 155 people on board. I’m sure some of those problems had undoubtedly been caused by his own (non-catastrophic) mistakes.
I give retakes. I give the better of the two grades, but with a cap of 90% on the retake. In my experience, students who are lazy or sloppy the first time around end up being too lazy to come in after school for a retake, or they procrastinate for so long that they forget what they knew and end up with a worse grade the second time around. The students who benefit from retakes are the ones who hadn’t quite mastered the concepts the first time around and made the effort to go back and master them, even if it was after we had gone on to the next topic. I have no problem rewarding that.
On the subject of retakes not reflecting real life, I recall a professional development discussion in which I described my retake policy. Several of the teachers in the discussion made a similar claim—that allowing retakes and second chances doesn’t reflect “real life”—that students don’t get a chance to retake the “important” tests. Before I had a chance to respond, another teacher replied, “Seems to me that the most important tests do allow multiple retakes—such as the MCAS (Mass. high-stakes tests), SAT, ACT, GRE, passing the bar (for lawyers), etc.”
Nature seldom gives us only one chance to master anything. In fact, nature generously gives most of us the same life lessons over and over and over again, without ever tiring of it, until we finally learn those lessons and move on. There is no such thing as failure until someone imposes a deadline.
Originally posted to the ap-chem discussion list.
