Before this year, choosing to retake an assessment at Oakton was often an extremely unpredictable process.
Under the previous retake system, the school had no standards for reassessing, leading to an erratic process filled with disparities between different teachers, even within the same department. These discrepancies led to widespread feelings of unfairness and resentment, and students across Oakton called for serious change.

This year, those students cries were finally answered, as Oakton has introduced a newer retake policy – a supposedly fairer one. This new policy, which emphasizes fairness among all teachers, has made it so that teachers in a given curricular team must have the same policy for their classes. It has also made it so that all teachers, regardless of department, must offer some sort of retake for major assessments.

On a widespread basis, this new system has experienced tremendous success. In a survey conducted on 32 students during early December, over 91% of the students polled agreed that the new system is an improvement over last year’s. Among the various reasons for their support, students most often cited what they believe to be the policy’s more extensive fairness.

“This new policy seems to be a lot more fair,” said 10th grader Sean Alecxih. ”For students who have worked hard in their class, it’s only fair that they get another shot on [assessments], which is not a chance everyone got last year.”

Beyond the apparent improvements in the system, the retake policy still has several loopholes which prevent it from being as fair as it could truly be. Although the policy now states that teachers in the same department must have a standard reassessment policy for similar assignments, little is being done to enforce this new measure. According to one source, who chose to remain anonymous due to disciplinary concerns, some teachers have retake policies entirely different from other teachers of the same class.

“For one of my classes the teacher demanded an insane amount of work to be done before I could reassess, making it so difficult that I hardly wanted to do it anymore,” said the source. “After talking to some of my friends outside my class, I found out that they didn’t do anywhere near the amount of work I had to before reassessing. It turned out my teacher had been making it especially unfair for my class.”

While the idea of a truly fair and universal retake policy is intriguing for both students and teachers alike, reaching that point is going to take a significant amount of work from both sides. As the quote goes, progress is impossible without change. Although this year’s changes have brought us closer to our end point, true progress on the front of retakes is going to take more effort on all our parts. Assuming, that is, we get the chance to try it again.