Isn’t it frustrating when you’re waiting days, even weeks, for your teacher to return an assessment back to you? While it’s easy to point fingers at teachers for this delay, the cause of the problem sometimes lies with students. Students are often guilty of missing assessments, leaving their classmates stuck waiting for teacher feedback. School administrators are aware of this issue.
In response, science department head John DeLuca recently raised the concern with other department heads, who all agreed that skipping tests isn’t just inconvenient, it’s unfair to everyone else.
“One of the best learning experiences that you can get out of assessments is being able to get quick feedback,” DeLuca said.
Students want quick feedback so they can learn from their mistakes and focus on ways they can improve. When students don’t get this feedback, they’re missing out on a key learning opportunity. Many teachers struggle with this issue.
“When a teacher is waiting for days, and sometimes even a week or two for all the students to take the assessment it puts them in a really tough dilemma,” DeLuca said.
Each teacher takes a different approach when giving make-up tests.Some teachers will create different versions of the test, some will give the same test but wait to return the completed ones, and some will just return the test regardless of who hasn’t taken it yet.
“We don’t have a permanent solution to this problem. One of the things I think about is if there are ways that we can incentivize students coming in on the day in which assessments are given,” DeLuca said.
DeLuca and other department heads have been looking into ways to raise the attendance of students in class on test days. One idea DeLuca has is to reward students with some sort of bonus if they have been present for a certain amount of test days.
“If we did try to implement a policy it would be at the beginning of a marking period or year, and it would be coordinated across all departments,” DeLuca said.
The struggle to balance fairness with practicality is not just felt by teachers, but also students. It’s very draining for students to wait on their classmates to take the test when all they want is their grade back. But it can also be unfair if a student is out sick and they’re stuck with a different test than the rest of the class.
“I have a lot of classmates that get upset when they are stuck with test ‘version B’ which is typically harder than what the initial test should be,” Sienna Schwartz ’27 said.
There are many mixed feelings regarding the test taking and rapid feedback dilemma. For the future, department heads hope they can find ways to minimize absences on test-day.
“One of the teachers who brought this to my attention said around 50% of the class was absent on test day,” DeLuca said. “That’s just hard to continue with.”
