By this time of my life, I had already encountered hundreds or possibly thousands of exams, tests, quizzes or whatever similar to these. Of course before the exam, you studied hard hoping to score a good grade in the test. But often the reality doesn’t sound like that. Sometimes you did better than you expected, sometimes worse than you expected. I guess the scenario of the latter happens more often than the first one for me.
Of course, you wait for your results of the test. After your test paper is being distributed by your instructor back, you take a look at the score then flip it through and see what are the mistakes being made then you just stuck your paper into the bag. Does that sound familiar?
These actions above are what most students did nowadays including me. Well, recently I have this professor that allows you to resubmit your test to get extra credits. How it works is that he will first mark your paper after the examination. If you have more than 75% of the question answered correctly, he will mark the particular question and you get the points you deserved based on what you have done during the exam. So if you get less than 75% of the question correctly, the professor will allow you to resubmit the question and received marks up to 75% of that single question. This means that if you completed the question correctly during the resubmission, for a question that is worth 10 points, you received 7.5 points.
At first, I was so annoyed because I need to go through the exam once again to re-do the questions that I made mistakes on. Soon I realized that the opportunity that allows you to resubmit your test paper is actually a perfect way of learning the materials of that particular subject. Not only you are able to re-submit your paper, you are able to get partial credits from the resubmission and best of all, learn through your mistakes. You going encounter lots of challengers in your life and learning from your mistakes is a key element in achieving great success in life. Many students today including me simply will not take the exam which is graded and re-do it again. We might take a look when the next exam is near but definitely not re-doing it.
I had been here studying in the States for almost two semesters. There’s definitely a strong difference between education system here and in Malaysia. Before I came to the US, I actually had a chance to study at a local college (Prefer not to name it, but it’s a well-known college in Malaysia). So, I was exposed to tertiary level of education in two different places. I must say it’s impossible for professors in Malaysia to do what my professor just did. Quite often, professors in universities till teachers at primary or high schools are being restricted to follow the system that is in place for a few decades. Perhaps, it’s time for education departments to give more room to these instructors to decide on what way to grade students as long as it is acceptable and all course materials are covered.
By,
Zhe Xu
27th November 2013
It's quite a good way in helping the student to learn from the mistakes. Meanwhile it provides them an opportunity to realize the true value of study in University before starting their career - gaining knowledge, instead of fighting first class-honour graduation blindly. Don't be an exam machine scorer, knowledge is far more meaningful than literally a Grade-A transcript.
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