AskDrCallahan Blog

For those of you that have examined our courses, we have a revolutionary way of grading tests. Well, we call it revolutionary because most curriculum and teachers do not use this method. However, it really does facilitate learning.

What we do it we give each test twice. The first time we give the test (open book and open notes) we grade it using right-answer only. Meaning, no “partial credit”, they either got it right, or they didn’t. There is no “almost”. Then, we give the test back to them and ask them to correct the ones they missed. They are allowed to use their books, their notes, and even to ask the teacher/parent for help, but they have to do the leg work to identify on their own what was wrong and how to fix it. Then, once they are able to fix their wrong problems we give them back 50% of what the problem was worth. Not only does this raise their grade significantly, but student learn two things: how to be careful and diligent the first time to get problems right, AND they learn that life doesn’t hand you “almost right”.

One of the the examples we use to explain to students why we think teaching them that there is a right and a wrong answer to everything is that if you were a doctor giving medicine to a patient, and they needed .2 mL of medicine. If you messed up one decimal place and accidentally wrote “2 mL” on the chart instead of point-2, you might kill the patient with an overdose and the idea that you were “just one decimal place off” doesn’t save them. That kind of example is extreme when speaking to high schoolers, we know this, however we are trying to give them a course and a learning method that prepares them for the future. Which is why they ARE allowed to correct their mistakes in class, when later in life they might not have that option. So we teach them to be careful the first time in an environment that is all about learning life skills as well as math.

We do not live in a partial credit society – we do not demand partial credit from the people who make our products – we demand the work 100%. We hold our students to these same standards.

With this method, students really learn. Instead of letting them “get by” with not knowing how to do something – they instead have to see where they went wrong and fix it.