zlacker

>>lxm+(OP)
> give students a five-day grace period to turn in work

I don't see how that changes anything. It just means the homework deadline is 5 days later.

> eliminate zeroes in grade books

Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests.

> and re-do tests

Once you know what is on the test, it isn't really a test anymore.

>>Walter+YJ
I mean allowing multiple redos for tests doesn’t seem awful. Especially if the test questions can be mixed up. My physics and calculus classes did this with online software & I mastered those subjects pretty heavily towards the end. I understand this can’t be repeated for all subjects but the general idea doesn’t seem like the worse

>>ahevia+tK
It's a lot of work to prepare a good physics exam, partly because you don't want to pose questions that the students are already familiar with.

>>Walter+dL
At what level? Undergraduate physics / secondary honors track, sure. But in MS physical science and the intro physics HS class I'm familiar with-- doing simple, well-understood kinematics problems is where a whole lot of test effort is spent (while trying to build intuition and process that the best students will be able to use for harder problems).

I mean, it's fun to ask "trick" questions, like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car, etc, but I wouldn't assess based on them. If students are going to be engineers or heavily use physics, they can go to AP physics and college physics classes and draw complicated free body diagrams and set up big equations.

>>mlyle+rO
I'm not suggesting "trick" questions. Let's give a simple example:

    10 * 10 = ?

If the student has already seen that question, he knows the answer is 100. If he hasn't seen it, he has to apply the the techniques learned to solve it.

Which of those two is a proper test question?

>>Walter+dQ
I think your example is a curious one, because obviously we want the student to know 10 * 10 by rote. Indeed, arithmetic is one area where (almost) everyone favors rote.

To be more general: if you're giving an 8th-9th grade kinematics test, there's two or three families of easy inclined plane problems, and hopefully your students have seen a few of all types. They shouldn't know the answer is "3.5 m/s", but they should be able to select a procedure they've used before and employ it.