If at First You Don't Succeed . . .

Say you fail an exam.    Should you be able to take it again?    If so, how often?    And should your eventual grade reflect the number of attempts, or not?

Some argue that the ability to re-take a test is a fundamental human right.    Others claim that it weakens our confidence in the examination system whose main purpose, after all, is to establish, and to reassure third parties, that the candidate knows his (or her) stuff.

Educational practice seems to swing between two extremes.    At one, it’s a sudden-death process.    One chance, and that’s it.    No appeals, no re-sits, nothing.    A-levels were like that in my day, as were my Oxford finals.

At the other, as for example with driving tests, you can have as many goes as you want.    It doesn’t matter whether you scrape through on your first, fifteenth or fifty-seventh attempt;   a pass is a pass.    You only need one, and any accumulated lorry-load of failures from the past is deemed to be irrelevant.

Keep it going

Of course, the assumption is that, after the fifth or sixth attempt, the candidate will give up and stop trying.    But don’t be so sure.    A story on the BBC tells of a “South Korean grandmother has failed her written driving test 771 times”.

That doesn’t come cheap.    She’s spent an estimated £2,000 on the attempts, a lot of money for someone who makes a living selling food and household items door to door from a handcart.    Not to mention the time involved, or the expense of getting to the testing centre.

Even worse, even if she finally succeeds in passing the written exam, she still has to take the practical test.

But, says the story, she intends to keep trying.    One can only marvel at such fortitude.    Robert the Bruce, eat your heart out.

Relying on results

But just how comfortable are we with this.    What if she finally passes?    Should her license reflect the fact that she has a history of 771 previous failures?

Should she be required to pass more than once, given the multiplicity of past failures?

You could argue that, by the law of averages, even the worst candidate is bound to pass, eventually.    No test is foolproof, after all;   some statistical variations are inevitable and, when you get up to numbers in three or four figures, the odd anomaly is bound to happen.

Perhaps she should be subject to periodic re-testing.    Perhaps all drivers should.    But we don’t (and this in spite of the fact that road accidents are a major source of death and serious injury in almost all countries).

You might argue that, where a practical skill is concerned, we should be rather more reluctant to allow re-sits than with a more theoretical or academic exam.    After all, bad Latin only annoys;   bad driving kills.

Yet, curiously, the reverse seems to be the case:   it is academe who resist re-sits;   vocational awarding bodies, at least in the UK, seem more comfortable with them than universities.   

The latter often have quite convoluted rules on re-sits, for example allowing re-sits in modules for honorary degrees but awarding only a pass degree if one or more modules had to be re-taken, or otherwise adjusting marks to take account of past failures.

And it isn’t just failures that are penalised.    In some circumstances, a candidate found guilty of cheating or plagiarism will have that attempt disallowed, but may be allowed to re-sit.

But suppose (s)he does, and passes with flying colours second time round.    Should that success be acknowledged unblemished?    Or should mention be made of the previous peccadillo in the final award.    Should (s)he be condemned forever for a moment of indiscretion?    Or is a success a success, whatever has gone before?

6th February, 2009
Sources: Quodlibs 326, 300, 299

Links

771 attempts (retrieved 06-02-09)
Robert the Bruce (retrieved 06-02-09)

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