Math Department Testing and Retake Policy

Our goal as a math department is to help our students work towards mastery of each of the learning standards for their grade.  For math, we have set mastery to be correctly answering 80% or more of the questions for that standard.  This allows students to make some small mistakes while still showing that they understand the overall concepts.  With that goal in mind, we provide students that have not mastered a particular learning standard, the opportunity to retake that part of the assessment.  

Each math test or quiz will be arranged so that all of the questions for a particular learning standard are grouped together.  Students will receive an overall grade for the test/quiz along with a score for each of the learning standards covered in the assessment.  A quiz may cover just a few learning standards while a test may cover upwards of 4-6 learning standards.

For any learning standard(s) that students did not achieve mastery, they will have the opportunity to retake that portion of the test/quiz to improve their score and demonstrate that they have now mastered that concept.  Retakes are designed to give students that may not have been as confident the first time to get a second opportunity to show their mastery of the material.  A student may not retake a portion of the assessment where they have achieved mastery of that learning standard.     

In order to be eligible to retake one or more parts of a test or quiz the student must:

• complete any missing assignments from the unit that the assessment covers
• complete additional practice to continue to work towards mastery of the learning target (as specified by teacher)
• advocate for themselves by asking their math teacher for help in preparing for the retake
• correct the problems missed on the original test or quiz to see where their mistakes occurred
• complete a retake form including a parent signature  

The retake of an assessment will be similar in the types of questions asked but is not the same test given a second time.  When the retake is complete, the student will receive points to move their score for that learning standard to the mastery level.  Since the point of the retake is to allow students to show that they have now mastered that learning standard, they may only improve their score for that section to a maximum of 80% which is mastery level.  

Example:

A student takes a 30 point quiz and earns a score of 21/30 which is a 70%.  For one of the learning standards on the quiz, the student scored a 3/10.  The student could retake that portion of the quiz because they scored less than 80% for that section.  The student retakes that part of the test and scores a 7/10. Overall, they have earned an additional 4 pts which is added to their overall score, giving them a 25/30 which is an 83%.

Given the same example, say that student does even better on their retake, getting 9/10 on the retaken section.  They are allowed to earn points up to 80% (mastery level) for that section of the test, so they would earn 5 points (8/10 = 80%) for that section which improves their overall grade on the quiz to a 26/30 which is an 87%.