Math Tests Examined

By CIARA O’NEILL ‘27

        You trudge into your math class, and see the dark cloud around your classmates’ faces, all of whom are holding a stapled collection of papers covered in red pen. Your teacher gives you an apologetic look with your test, and you turn it over to see a dark red 73. Not ideal. You look back on last Wednesday. Maybe you had to help a friend in distress over a homecoming dress, maybe your parents insisted that you call them, maybe you were swamped with other classes. Either way, very little studying occurred. You’ve done very well on every other test this year, yet you approach the midterm with a B-.

        “Class, it seems a lot of you struggled with this test, so I would like to inform everyone that you can retake this test and get up to 75 placed in your grade book,” your teacher announces. Great, now you have an extra test to study for, and you can only improve your grade by two points. It seems pointless, likely because it is pointless. There has to be a more effective method, and there is.

        First, it’s important to address that teachers allowing retakes in the first place is incredibly kind and virtuous of them, and something I personally really appreciate. That being said, every system can improve in some way, and this is how I would improve the retake system at Exeter.

        Now, moving on to the problems with this retake system. For the purposes of this article, it will be referred to as the 75 System. It prevents many students unhappy with their grades from improving them. If a student gets just over or under a 75, they are likely not happy with their grade, but can do little to nothing to improve it. Additionally, if one student initially got a 45 on their test, but gets a perfect score on their retake, then they have a higher grade than another student who got a 74, but decided that retaking the test wasn’t worth it. In what world is that fair? The 75 System also demoralizes students who have to take a test knowing that their highest possible grade is a solid C.

        Another idea would be to not count the initial grade and give people retaking the test the opportunity to get full marks. Though this would be awesome from the student’s perspective, obviously the teacher cannot do this. This system would invalidate the efforts of the students that initially did well on the test. It also leads to a paradoxical problem, how many times can the students retake this test? Could a student continue to retake the test infinitely?

        Now, what type of system addresses all of these issues? The answer is an Averaging System. Some teachers at Exeter use this system, but it is not nearly as common. If the score of the retake is simply averaged with the orginal score, the overall resulting grade is much more fair for all parties. The students who did well on the initial test will still have higher scores than those who initially did poorly, and students who struggled more on the initial test won’t have their entire grade tanked. It’s motivating for students, and properly values the work that all parties put into their tests.

        Therefore, the implementation of an Averaging System for all test retakes at Exeter would lead to grades more reflective of the work of the student body. It would reward students for their work on the retake and also give credit to the students who did well on the initial test. Some might say this is the test-retake system of the future.