A New Way to Do Test Corrections for AP Environmental Science

Curves on Unit tests in AP classes is always a hot topic in the AP Facebook groups...at least the ones that I'm a part of. For the AP Unit tests that I give, I give the square root curve. Yes, I know it's a big curve, but I am determined to keep these AP classes accessible to any student who would like to take them, and this curve is part of what helps make that happen. The curve doesn't come for free though. Students must complete test corrections to "earn" the curve. I want to do whatever I can to help them actually learn this material. 

I used to have students explain why the right answer was the right answer for the multiple choice questions, but many students struggled with it and tended to just restate the question and answer or would write an incorrect explanation, which isn't helpful.  So now, for each question they get wrong, they write the essential knowledge statement that they feel goes with the question. (And this adds another use to the document I give them with all the LOs and EKs for the unit.) I have decided to expand that to them also using statements from their video notes and review book, so they don't write the same EK more than once. 

To help students narrow down which EK to use, I download the assessment that I've made on AP Classroom and then use adobe acrobat to add which topic each question is from. Students take the MCQ portion of their unit tests in the lockdown browser of AP Classroom, but when they do corrections (in my classroom), I give them the printed copy of MCQs to work with. 

Even though they take their test through AP Classroom, I have them also bubble their answers into a Zipgrade form. After the test, I print out their results from Zipgrade which includes their answers and what the correct answers are. This way, they know exactly which questions they need to do corrections on. They need this since I only allow access to their scores on AP Classroom, no question information. I print a few sets of MCQs, since only a few students come in to do corrections at a time, so there are typically enough copies to share. 

I have been liking this new way of doing test corrections far more than the old way, and at least students are writing true statements on their corrections!