We’ve just finished our first assessment cycle (well .. one more paper to go with year 9’s tomorrow!) and we’ve done the whole RAG’ing of questions and reviewed the papers so when someone asked me last week if we re-test students it really made me think. The answer is no we don’t but I definitely see some merit in getting students to re-look at those questions in relation to topics that I know they have been taught and SHOULD be getting right. We always get them to re-do questions for those real “facepalm” questions as part of reviewing the papers but like we usually do, Seager and I bounced the idea around and have a plan of action with our year 11’s that we are going to trial this half term holiday.  We’ve gone through the test papers that were used and collated the questions that ALL our super-group students should have got correct into one document. We know we’ve taught them the topics. They know that we know that they have been taught it. We’ve reviewed the papers in class and they SHOULD be getting these questions right. No exceptions. 

Anyway we now have this document that I have called “half term homework” (and no they don’t get to take their previously sat tests home with them to help!). I love the idea that we are not accepting anything less than their best work … they know this stuff and even better they know that we know they (**should**) know this stuff! There will of course be mistakes made and that is understandable but given the higher demands of the new GCSE we need to up our game … or is it the students that now need to step up? Just in case you think that sounds harsh – we aren’t asking students to do anything they have never been taught and they also have the support of JustMathsOnline to help them as we’ve focused on specific topics. Actually, now I’ve written that I’m wondering why I feel the need to justify myself … I should not feel the need to justify having high expectations should I?

If this works I’m thinking I’ll roll it out to my year 9 and 10’s …  thought I’d share … as always it’s not ground breaking and you can of course ignore me!