These policies can help to improve the mental health of students
If the point is for the children to learn, then why wouldn’t you give them as many chances as it takes? What is the benefit of telling a child “you failed and that’s the end of it”?
I’m 25, and in my trade school, our tests aren’t judgement, they’re testing to see what we’ve retained, and identify what we’re missing.
If I weld a joint, and the CWI comes up behind me with a radiographic test for it and finds that I just laid hot metal on cold metal or it looks like a sponge inside, you know what’s gonna happen? You think they’re gonna give me a low score and tell me to move on? Fuck no. They’re gonna hand me a grinder and tell me to take it out and put it in right.
When there’s actual work to be done, we don’t leave it at the first attempt if that attempt was shit. We don’t leave a trail of “what’s done is done.” If it takes you four attempts, that’s what it takes, and next time it’ll take fewer because you learned how to do it right after the third time.
School, as it’s set up, with unforgiving deadlines and single attempt high stakes tests are building a shitty work ethic. It says “I tried once, and that’s all you’re getting.” It sets you up to leave a trail of cut losses and barely or unfinished projects as you scramble to get something, anything, turned in before the deadline.
And we wonder now why nothing works at launch.
This is one of many reasons why I think exams are worthless as a pedagogical method, and got rid of them from all of mine. They just don’t mimic any real world scenario.
In the real world, you can always look up and double check stuff. In the real world, if it turns out you were wrong you don’t just walk away and write it off, you go back and redo it. I think they encourage a useless and unproductive mindset. (To say nothing of the way they only test short term memorisation, not long term learning and understanding.)
