What are exam retakes?

There is a growing body of academic literature and study that asserts that your assessment itself is not the most important part of testing; rather, it is what follows from the assessment that is the greatest determinant of student success and outcome. One way to improve your students’ outcomes in this regard is to use exam retakes.

Sometimes students do not perform on their summative assessments to the level of which they believe they are capable. Exam retakes are a powerful tool in the instructor’s arsenal to empower students to achieve success in a course and improve both their grade and more importantly their retention of the course material.

In large lecture courses that incorporate exam retakes, traditionally that consists of offering students multiple attempts on an exam. Instructors will either create more than one version of an exam or ideally a large bank of possible exam questions that ICON can pull from so that each student receives a different assessment each time they attempt to retake the exam. This encourages students to look beyond finding specific answers to the specific problems on their exam, and instead learn the underlying concepts that drive those problems.

How can you use exam retakes in your course?

While creating assessments that allow for exam retakes can seem daunting, it is meaningful and worthwhile work. The easiest way to incorporate it is to create multiple versions of a test or an online assessment in ICON that utilizes the question bank functionality. That way, students who opt-in to an exam retake will be presented with an assessment that test the same principles while using different problem sets. Moreover, creating assessments in this way can also ameliorate worries of inappropriate conduct, as each student essentially receives a bespoke exam that selects different questions from a large bank and therefore makes it far more difficult to cheat.

After creating the assessments, you’ll need to decide how to implement retakes in your course. They are usually most easily administered through the members of the teaching team that handle discussion sections, as they know the students and can help them schedule their retakes, either on their own time or in the campus’ testing centers. Moreover, since the grading of these exams will likely fall to these members of your teaching team, it’s important to make sure they understand the reasoning behind retakes and how best to assist students before and after their retake attempts.

What results can you expect from incorporating exam retakes into your course?

Exam retakes are one of the most powerful ways students can re-engage with material in a meaningful way and improve their understanding of the concepts of the course. Benjamin Bloom (he of the eponymous taxonomy) asserted the importance of re-teaching and re-assessing in student success, as highlighted in this Education Week article: “To bring improvement, Bloom stressed formative assessments must be followed by high-quality, corrective instruction designed to remedy whatever learning errors the assessments identified.” Corrective instruction – the opportunity to see their errors, learn from them, and then re-engage with similar problems to demonstrate mastery of the material – is what exam retakes can facilitate.

MATH:1440 has incorporated exam retakes into their course since Spring 2023. This has improved student performance in exams and in the course as a whole. We have yet to see the long-term effects of this change in the MATH:1440 students, but have seen these benefits in other, smaller courses such as MATH:1005.

Who can help if you’re interested in incorporating exam retakes into your course?

If you need ICON assistance in how to incorporate question banks into your assessments, please contact the Tier 3 ICON support team and they can assist you.

If you would like to explore how you could use this in your course, please reach out to the Center for Teaching for assistance and guidance on how best to implement these activities.