On Friday I gave my AP Statistics students a test that should have been easy.  The test was on hypothesis tests and confidence intervals.  They had to decide which procedure of the two to do for each problem (looking for code words:  “evidence” or “claim” = hypothesis test and “construct” or “estimate” = confidence interval).  For each procedure, we had gone over, in detail (or so I thought), that each requires a 4-step process with each step labeled clearly.

Imagine my dismay on Saturday when I graded their tests and found short one-sentence answers or disorganized work with incomplete steps or steps out of order.  What happened?  Of course I had taken time to make the test, and another hour to grade the test.  I could have just given them the bad grades and called it a day.  In fact, the grades weren’t even that bad.  No one scored below a 60.  But, I simply couldn’t sit with such a deficit.  How could they not know how to do such straightforward problems?  I simply couldn’t move forward.

Instead, first thing Monday morning I told them I wasn’t accepting their tests.  I handed them back without entering them in the grade book.  Instead, we spent Monday going over the answers to the test and they would have a new test on Tuesday.  This means double work for me and I told them that this extra work on my part went into my decision.  Meaning, I think these concepts are so important, I am willing to work double!  The kids who did well of course weren’t happy.  Although as I told them:  if you did well on Friday, you should be able to do just as well on Tuesday.

I’m sharing this experience because I think sometimes we have our “deal breaker” concepts; items that simply must be mastered before we can move on.  This happens all the time in life, right?  If you don’t pass your drivers test, you need to keep testing until you can drive.  I’m not happy that I had to scrap my plans for this week and spend two extra days on this material (something really hard to swallow with an AP curriculum) but I feel it’s importance that as Statistics students they know when and how to do basic inference.  It’s a good lesson for our students too that sometimes what they put in just isn’t good enough.  And they will have to go back and do better until it meets a certain level of excellence.