Tag: assessment

Formative vs Summative Assessment: The Difference, and How to Use Both in Grades 6–12

Formative assessment happens during learning to find out what to do next; summative assessment happens after it to record what was learned. The real difference in formative vs summative assessment is not the test itself but what the result gets used for. The same quiz can be either, depending on whether it changes your teaching or decides a grade.

Key Takeaways

The difference is the use, not the task. Dylan Wiliam’s review is explicit that formative and summative describe the function a piece of evidence actually serves. A unit test read and acted on is doing formative work. An exit ticket that goes in a pile is not.
A check that counts toward the grade stops telling you the truth. Students protect the score instead of showing you the confusion. That is the single most common way a school ends up with a calendar full of formative assessment and no formative information.
The honest effect size is about 0.20, not 0.70. Kingston and Nash screened more than 300 studies and found only 13 usable, yielding a weighted mean of 0.20 — and a 2012 commentary from five assessment researchers argued even that number should not be treated as settled.
At scale it gets smaller again. A pre-registered trial in 140 English secondary schools, roughly 25,000 pupils, found an effect of 0.09 on GCSE Attainment 8 — not significant at the 5 percent level — and it did not narrow the disadvantage gap.
There is no research-backed ratio. What there is, is a coverage test: every standard a summative assessment will judge should have been checked while there was still time to fix it.

Ask ten teachers to explain formative vs summative assessment and you will get ten versions of the same sentence: formative is during, summative is at the end. That is close enough to be useful and wrong in the way that matters. It describes when the task happens. The distinction that actually changes anything in a classroom is about what you do with the result afterward, and most schools get that part backwards while keeping the vocabulary perfectly.

This is a definitional article, so it starts with the definitions. But the useful part is further down: the two-axis version of the distinction, the honest numbers on how much formative assessment buys you, and the gradebook question that decides whether any of it works.

What is the difference between formative and summative assessment?

Formative assessment gathers evidence while there is still time to act on it, and the teacher or student uses that evidence to change what happens next. Summative assessment measures what was learned after the learning is finished, and the result is recorded rather than acted on. Purpose separates them; timing usually follows from purpose.

Comparison graphic contrasting formative and summative assessment across purpose, timing, stakes, who uses the result, what the student does next, and gradebook treatment.

Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center puts the purposes plainly: formative assessment exists to “monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback” and is generally low stakes with “low or no point value,” while summative assessment exists to “evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark” and is often high stakes with a high point value. Those two sentences do more work than most professional development on the subject.

Laid out side by side, the differences line up like this.

	Formative assessment	Summative assessment
Purpose	Find out what to teach next	Record what was learned
Timing	During a unit, while there is still time	At the end of a unit, course or year
Stakes	Low or none	Usually high
Who uses the result	The teacher and the student, immediately	The gradebook, the transcript, the school, the state
What the student does next	Revises, retries, gets reteaching	Usually nothing — the work is over
Typical grades 6–12 examples	Exit ticket, mid-draft read, circulating question, project check-in, practice problem set	Unit test, final essay, presented project, end-of-course exam, state test
Gradebook treatment	Out of the grade, or very low weight	Carries the grade
What it tells you	Where the class is right now	How far the class got

Purpose and stakes from the Eberly Center’s definitions; the remaining rows are this guide’s practical restatement for grades 6–12, not part of any single framework.

Keep one thing in view while reading that table: every row describes a tendency, and the first row is the only one that defines anything. The rest follow from it most of the time and can come apart from it, which is the next section.

What is formative assessment?

Formative assessment is any practice in which evidence of student learning is elicited, interpreted, and used to make a better-founded decision about what to teach next. The defining move is the last one. Collecting evidence you never use is not formative assessment; it is paperwork.

The formulation most of the field works from is Black and Wiliam’s 2009 version, quoted in Wiliam’s own review of the definitions: practice is formative “to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used” by teachers, learners or peers “to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded.” Note the hedge built into it — to the extent that. It is a matter of degree, not a label you apply to a worksheet.

Wiliam and Thompson’s five strategies are the practical version, and they are worth having on a wall:

Clarifying learning intentions and sharing criteria for success.
Engineering classroom discussions, activities and tasks that elicit evidence of learning.
Providing feedback that moves learners forward.
Activating students as instructional resources for one another.
Activating students as the owners of their own learning.

Only the second one is what most people picture when they hear the word assessment. The other four are about what surrounds the check, and they are where the work is. If you want the technique bank rather than the theory, we keep a list of formative assessment strategies that hold up in a real class period separately.

What is summative assessment?

Summative assessment evaluates learning after a unit of instruction, against a standard or benchmark, and produces a result that gets recorded. Its job is to describe accurately where a student ended up. That is a legitimate and necessary job, and it is a different job from improving the learning.

Summative assessment gets treated as the villain in a lot of assessment writing, which is silly. Students are entitled to an honest account of what they can do, families are entitled to know, and no amount of formative checking substitutes for a moment where the work is finished and judged. The problem is never that summative assessment exists. It is that in a lot of schools it is the only assessment that gets planned, and everything else is improvised around it.

A summative assessment also does not have to be a test. In project-based work the summative assessment is usually the product and the defence of it, which has its own design problems — we cover those in assessment for project-based learning.

When the summative assessment does need to be a test, it should be a fair one that you did not write at 11pm. Mid-Terms.org has 200 free printable midterms with answer keys for grades 6–12 in Social Studies, ELA, Math and Science — 20 courses, 10 midterms each — and a Form A and Form B for every course.

Is the difference the assessment itself, or what you do with the result?

It is what you do with the result. Wiliam’s review separates two distinctions that get collapsed: assessment for learning versus of learning is about the purpose a task was designed for, while formative versus summative “relates to the function it actually serves.” Design is an intention. Function is what happened.

Graphic showing formative and summative as a function axis crossed with formal and informal as a construction axis, producing four combinations with a classroom example in each.

This is the part that turns a vocabulary lesson into something you can act on. Black and colleagues put it as a threshold: assessment “becomes ‘formative assessment’ when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs.” Until then it is just a task. Which produces two consequences teachers run into constantly:

A summative test can be used formatively. Read the unit test, find that two-thirds of the class missed the same standard, reteach it. That test just did formative work, grade and all.
A tool built for formative use can function summatively. Weight the exit tickets at fifteen percent of the quarter and they are now low-stakes summative assessments that students will optimise rather than answer honestly.

There is a second axis worth keeping separate from this one, because mixing the two is the most common confusion in the whole topic. Formal and informal describe how a check is built — planned and written in advance, or improvised while circulating. Formative and summative describe what the result is for. They cross, which gives four real combinations: a planned exit ticket you sort and act on is formal and formative; a unit test that sets a grade is formal and summative; a follow-up question that changes your next sentence is informal and formative; and a teacher quietly filing a student as one of the weak ones based on an offhand answer is informal and summative, which is the box nobody names. We take that axis apart on its own in formal vs informal formative assessment; this article stays on the formative/summative one.

Does formative assessment actually raise achievement?

Yes, modestly, and the widely quoted numbers are too big. The best-known meta-analysis of the studies that could be used found a weighted mean effect of about 0.20. A large randomised trial in English secondary schools found about 0.09. Formative assessment is worth doing and it has been oversold.

Here is the honest history, because it matters for how you talk to a principal about it. Black and Wiliam’s 1998 review is the source of the effect-size range — roughly 0.4 to 0.7 — that has been repeated in professional development for twenty-five years. In 2011, Neal Kingston and Brooke Nash went looking for the studies behind it. They screened more than 300 and found 13 that reported enough information to compute an effect size, yielding 42 independent effect sizes. The median was 0.25; a random-effects model gave a weighted mean of 0.20. By subject: 0.32 in English language arts, 0.17 in mathematics, 0.09 in science. Their conclusion was that the commonly cited figure near 0.70 is not supported by the research base.

Graphic comparing the commonly quoted 0.4 to 0.7 formative assessment effect-size range with Kingston and Nash's weighted mean of 0.20 and the 0.09 found in a 140-school randomised trial.

And then the contrary evidence, which deserves saying out loud. In 2012, Derek Briggs, Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo, Erin Furtak, Lorrie Shepard and Yue Yin published a commentary arguing that the 0.20 figure should not be treated as a baseline either. Their objections were specific: the literature search was not validated or replicable; requiring studies to use the phrase “formative assessment” excluded most work published before 2000, leaving only one such study in the review; two qualifying studies were omitted while one without a control group was included; and effect sizes computed with and without pretest data were pooled as though comparable, which in one dataset moved the mean from −0.32 to −0.14 depending on method. They concluded that “considerable uncertainty remains” and that a different set of studies could produce a meaningfully higher or lower average.

So the defensible statement is not “formative assessment produces an effect of 0.20.” It is that the research base is too thin and too uneven to support any single number, and that the numbers it does support are far below what the slide decks claim.

The cleanest evidence is the newest and the least flattering. In 2021 Jake Anders and colleagues reported a pre-registered, school-level cluster-randomised trial of the Embedding Formative Assessment programme: 140 English secondary schools, 70 treatment and 70 control, roughly 25,000 pupils, two years of monthly teacher learning communities and peer observation, analysed by intention to treat on administrative data. The effect on GCSE Attainment 8 was 1.66 points, d = 0.09, with a confidence interval from −0.01 to 0.18 — not significant at the conventional 5 percent level, though significant at 10 percent. English and maths effects were about 0.05 and not significant. For pupils eligible for free school meals the effect was smaller, 0.07, so the disadvantage gap did not narrow. Pupils with low prior attainment showed larger effects, but the difference between subgroups was not statistically significant.

That is what two years of well-supported, teacher-led formative assessment work bought at scale in real schools. It is a real, positive, small effect. Anyone presenting formative assessment as the highest-leverage thing available to a secondary school is quoting 1998 and ignoring everything since.

That trial matters more than a classroom teacher might think, because what it tested is exactly what a district buys. Embedding Formative Assessment is a packaged programme — nine monthly teacher learning community workshops a year plus monthly peer observation, delivered with light-touch external support and run mostly by teachers inside their own schools. If you are being asked to approve a districtwide formative assessment initiative, 0.09 on the primary outcome and no narrowing of the disadvantage gap is the number to hold the proposal against, not 0.70.

How many formative checks should you run before a summative assessment?

No study supports a particular ratio, and anyone who gives you one is giving you a preference dressed as research. Use a coverage test instead: every standard the summative assessment will judge should have been checked at least once while there was still time to do something about it.

Ratios like 3:1 or 80/20 show up in district assessment policies and they are made up. What is defensible is the sequence, and it is easy to audit. Take the unit test you are about to give, list the standards it asks about, and for each one answer a single question: when did I last see evidence of this, and did I change anything because of it? Any standard where the answer is “the test” is a standard you are measuring rather than teaching.

List the standards the summative assessment will judge. Usually four to eight for a secondary unit.
For each one, name the check that already happened. An exit ticket, a mid-draft read, a circulating question, a practice set you actually looked at.
For each one, name what you changed. If nothing changed, the check was data collection, not formative assessment.
Fill the gaps before the test, not after it. A standard with no check gets one in the last few days of the unit, even if it is thirty seconds of circulating.
Then give the summative assessment and leave the reteaching time in the calendar. A summative assessment with nothing after it cannot do double duty, and double duty is free.

Should formative assessment go in the gradebook?

Keep it out, or weight it near zero. A check that counts stops being a check. Students respond to stakes by protecting the score, which means they show you their best guess rather than their actual confusion — and the confusion was the entire reason you asked.

This is the practical consequence of the function argument above, and it is where most school assessment systems quietly fail. A department decides formative assessment matters, so it gives formative work a weight to make students take it seriously. The weight converts the work into a low-stakes summative assessment. Students optimise. The teacher keeps getting clean exit tickets and keeps being surprised by the unit test. Nobody notices, because the calendar is full of things labelled formative.

Two complications worth being honest about. First, a lot of secondary students will not do ungraded work, and that is a real constraint rather than a character flaw — they are budgeting attention across seven classes. The workable answer is usually completion credit rather than accuracy credit: the work counts for having been done, not for having been right. Second, if formative work is out of the grade, the grade rests almost entirely on summative assessment, which raises the stakes of each summative task and makes the retake question unavoidable. We go through the evidence on that in whether students should be allowed to retake tests, and the broader question of what a grade should represent in what standards-based grading actually fixes.

There is a third consequence that falls on families rather than on teachers, and it is worth getting ahead of. If formative work leaves the gradebook, a parent checking the portal in week three may see two entries where they used to see fifteen, and the reasonable conclusion from the outside is that nothing is being assessed. The fix is a sentence, sent once at the start of a term: the grade reflects what your child can do at the end of a unit, the practice in between is not counted on purpose so that mistakes during it are free, and here is where you can see that practice. A policy that is defensible but unexplained still generates the phone call.

Student self-assessment runs into exactly the same split, and the research there is unusually clear about it: used formatively and ungraded it supports achievement, and used summatively it mostly teaches students to inflate. That is covered separately.

What to tell students about why it does not count

Teenagers are not confused by this, but they are suspicious of it, and with reason — they have been told before that something does not count and then watched it count. So say the actual reasoning out loud, because the reasoning is good and they can follow it: this one is not for a grade, because I need to know what you genuinely do not understand yet, and if it were graded you would sensibly show me your best guess instead. Being wrong here costs you nothing. Being wrong on Friday costs you something. So be wrong here.

That is a more respectful position than it sounds, and it is also just true. A student who understands that the ungraded check is the safe place to be wrong will use it that way. A student who suspects everything is secretly being recorded will protect themselves on every task, which is a rational response to a system that has not explained itself.

Where the formative vs summative distinction goes wrong in real schools

Four failure modes account for most of it, and none of them is a vocabulary problem. Each one is a case of the label being right and the function being wrong.

Labelled formative, used summatively. The most common one. The task is called formative, carries a weight, and produces optimised answers instead of information.
Formative data collected and never used. Exit tickets in a stack on the desk. The eliciting happened; the interpreting and using did not, which means no formative assessment occurred.
No time budgeted for the response. A check that reveals a problem on Thursday is worthless if Friday is the test and Monday is the next unit. The check is not the practice. The change is the practice.
Summative assessment treated as the finish line. The test is graded, returned, and never read by the teacher as data. A unit test is the richest formative information a secondary teacher gets all month and most of it is thrown away.

Clay’s take: the word is doing almost no work

I have sat in meetings where the phrase “formative assessment” meant a specific document that had to be uploaded by Friday. That is the state of the term in a lot of buildings. It has become a noun describing a thing you submit, when the research definition is a verb about something you do with information.

My room is a workshop — tables in groups, no rows, and I am moving between them on a stool most of the period rather than standing at the front. The best formative information I get all day is not a document. It is overhearing a group work a misconception out loud before it spreads to the table next to them, and changing what I say to the whole class ninety seconds later. None of that gets recorded anywhere. By the research definition it is textbook formative assessment, because the evidence was elicited, interpreted and used. By the district definition it does not exist, because nothing got uploaded.

That gap is worth naming, because it points at the practical takeaway. If you want more formative assessment in a secondary classroom, the lever is almost never another instrument. It is building the period so you are among the work while it is being done, and leaving enough slack in the unit that finding a problem is not an inconvenience. Everything else is documentation.

I know what the second half of that sounds like to anyone teaching to a pacing guide. If the calendar says you are on the Industrial Revolution the week of the fourth, there is no slack to leave — that is the honest situation in a lot of buildings and pretending otherwise is useless. The version that survives a pacing guide is smaller: budget one class period per unit with nothing scheduled in it, and decide what goes in it on the day, based on what the checks turned up. One period is defensible to anyone who asks, it is recoverable if the unit runs long, and it is the difference between finding a problem and being able to do something about it. If you cannot protect one period in a three-week unit, the constraint is the pacing guide, and that is a conversation to have with the person who wrote it rather than a problem to solve with better exit tickets.

And I would be careful with the numbers in either direction. The honest version — this helps a modest amount, the big figures are not supported, and the best trial at scale found 0.09 — is more useful to a teacher than the sales pitch, because it sets a realistic expectation for what changing your practice will feel like. A 0.09 effect across 140 schools is not nothing. It is also not going to be visible in your own gradebook by Christmas, and if you were promised it would be, you were misinformed.

What should you do next?

Pick the unit you are teaching now and run the coverage test above on its summative assessment. It takes about fifteen minutes and it will usually turn up one standard the test judges that nothing has checked.

Run the five-step coverage audit on your current unit.
Find out what weight formative work carries in your gradebook. If it is more than a token, that is the first thing to change, and completion credit is the usual compromise.
Put one block of reteaching time after your next summative assessment, before the next unit starts, so the test can do formative work too.
Pick two or three checks from the strategy list and run them for a fortnight rather than trying to rebuild your whole assessment system at once.

Want the fullest version of a formative check actually changing what happens next? That is Bloom’s mastery learning cycle — the check stays ungraded, the results get sorted by error rather than by score, and a second attempt is built into the plan. The evidence for it is more contested than its reputation suggests, which is covered there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between formative and summative assessment?

Formative assessment happens during learning and the result is used to decide what to teach next. Summative assessment happens after a chunk of learning and the result is used to record how much was learned. The distinction is about what the evidence is used for, not about the format of the task. A written test can serve either purpose depending on what the teacher does with it.

Is a quiz formative or summative?

Either, depending on what happens next. A quiz you read, sort by error, and reteach from is formative. The same quiz entered as a grade and never revisited is summative. Nothing about the quiz itself settles the question, which is why calling a task “the formative” and a different task “the summative” gets the concept backwards.

Should formative assessment be graded?

It can be recorded, but if it counts heavily toward the final mark students will protect the score instead of showing you the confusion, which destroys the information you needed. Most workable secondary systems either keep formative work out of the grade or give it very low weight, and put the grade on the summative work that comes after the reteaching.

What is the ideal ratio of formative to summative assessment?

No study supports a specific ratio, and anyone quoting one is giving you a preference. The practical test is coverage: every standard a summative assessment will judge should have been checked informally at least once while there was still time to fix it. If a question on the unit test is the first time you have looked at that skill, the sequence is wrong.

How effective is formative assessment really?

More modest than the famous numbers suggest. Kingston and Nash’s 2011 meta-analysis of the usable studies found a weighted mean effect of about 0.20, not the 0.40 to 0.70 range often quoted, and a 2012 commentary argued even that single figure is unreliable. A 140-school randomised trial in England found about 0.09. Worth doing, oversold.

Are formative and summative the same as informal and formal?

No. Formal and informal describe how a check is built — planned and written down, or improvised in the moment. Formative and summative describe what the result is used for. They are two separate axes, so a planned written check can be formative, and an offhand judgment can function summatively.

What are examples of formative and summative assessment in middle and high school?

Formative: an exit ticket you sort before tomorrow, a mid-draft read of a thesis statement, a circulating question that changes your next sentence, a project check-in. Summative: a unit test, a final essay, a project presented to an outside audience, an end-of-course exam. The same artefact can switch categories if its purpose changes.

Can a summative assessment be used formatively?

Yes, and it is one of the cheapest upgrades available. If you read a unit test, find that two-thirds of the class missed the same standard, and reteach it before moving on, that test has done formative work even though it also produced a grade. The limiting factor is whether anything in your schedule allows the reteaching to happen.

Sources

Wiliam, Dylan. “What Is Assessment for Learning?” Studies in Educational Evaluation, 2011. UCL Discovery open-access copy. The source for the function-not-instrument definition, the Black and Wiliam (2009) formulation, and the five key strategies.
Kingston, Neal, and Brooke Nash. “Formative Assessment: A Meta-Analysis and a Call for Research.” Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 30, no. 4 (2011). Read via the ERIC record. More than 300 studies screened, 13 usable, 42 independent effect sizes, weighted mean 0.20, median 0.25; 0.32 in English language arts, 0.17 in mathematics, 0.09 in science.
Briggs, Derek C., Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo, Erin Furtak, Lorrie Shepard, and Yue Yin. “Meta-Analytic Methodology and Inferences About the Efficacy of Formative Assessment.” Commentary for Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 2012, University of Colorado Boulder. The methodological rebuttal to the 0.20 figure.
Anders, Jake, Francesca Foliano, Matt Bursnall, Richard Dorsett, Nathan Hudson, Johnny Runge, and Stefan Speckesser. “The Effect of Embedding Formative Assessment on Pupil Attainment.” CEPEO Working Paper 21-10, UCL, 2021. Pre-registered cluster-randomised trial, 140 English secondary schools, roughly 25,000 pupils.
Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, Carnegie Mellon University. “What Is the Difference Between Formative and Summative Assessment?” Accessed for the stakes-and-purpose definitions and the worked examples.

About Clay Shumate

Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

November 2, 2026

Should Students Be Allowed to Retake Tests? What the Research Says and How to Write a Fair Policy

By Clay Shumate

Yes, students should be allowed to retake tests, as long as the policy is written down. A fair retake follows real reteaching or corrections, measures the same learning, is capped, and says which score counts. The evidence for grades 6–12 is thin, so the design matters more than the debate.

Key Takeaways

The best K–12 evidence is one cluster randomized trial in 29 schools: a standards-based grading package with reassessment raised ninth-grade math scores about 13 percentile points (0.33 standard deviations). It tested the whole package, not retakes alone.
Most direct evidence on retake rules comes from college courses and national admission exams, not grade 6–12 classrooms, and it points both ways: lower self-reported anxiety with second chances, lower dropout when one university cut attempts from six to three.
Teachers are divided. In a national survey of nearly 1,000 K–12 teachers, 41 percent called unlimited retakes helpful and 37 percent called them harmful, the most accepted of five policies studied.
Design beats the yes-or-no question: require corrections first, use a parallel version, cap attempts, set a window, and say in advance which score counts.
Offer retakes by rule, not by request. A retake open only to students who ask favors the families who already know to ask.

Ask a department whether students should be allowed to retake tests and you will usually hear two speeches. The first says a grade should report what a student learned, and learning does not expire on test day. The second says deadlines and one honest attempt are part of learning to prepare. Both contain something true. Neither tells you what to put in the handbook.

This guide skips the speeches. It covers what the research on retakes actually studied, who was in it, the contrary evidence, and the decisions a retake policy has to make. It is written for grades 6–12. Where the evidence comes from college students or national exams, the text says so, because those students are not yours.

The position matches the rest of this site: expectations stay high, the consequence is real, and a student gets a way to repair a mistake. A retake should cost effort, not dignity, which is the logic behind the late work policy and the no-zero grading policy. The broader argument is in learning from mistakes.

Should students be allowed to retake tests?

Yes, in most secondary classrooms, with conditions. A retake belongs in the policy when its purpose is learning the material, when the student does work to earn it, and when every student gets the same rules. Unlimited, on-demand retakes with no requirement are where policies fail.

The pros and cons of retaking tests are both real. The case for is simple: a test measures one student on one day. If that student studies properly and shows the learning two weeks later, the second result is better evidence than the first. A gradebook that keeps the first number forever reports an event, not an outcome.

The case against is also real. Deadlines teach preparation, and a test that can be retaken at any time can turn the first attempt into a rehearsal. Writing, proctoring, and scoring second versions also lands on adults who already have a full day.

The two cases only collide when the policy is vague. A retake that is earned, comes once, and arrives inside a window keeps most of the benefit and most of the safeguards.

One objection deserves a direct answer: real life does not give do-overs. That is only half right. Adults retake things constantly, but usually with a wait, a cost, or a cap. A good school policy copies the wait and the effort, not the absence of a second chance, and treats students as people who can be handed a clear rule and expected to meet it.

What does the research on retaking tests actually show?

Less than the debate suggests. The strongest K–12 result is a randomized trial of a whole standards-based grading package in ninth-grade math. Nearly everything else on retakes comes from college courses, surveys, or national exams, and those results do not all point the same direction.

The best-controlled K–12 evidence is the PARLO trial, reviewed by the What Works Clearinghouse. Teachers organized each semester around 10 to 15 learning outcomes, gave formative feedback, and let students reassess for full credit; grades reflected demonstrated outcomes, not a points average. Of 2,736 students analyzed, those in PARLO classrooms scored 0.33 standard deviations higher on an end-of-course assessment, about 13 percentile points. The review rated it meets standards with reservations, citing high attrition of whole schools (18 intervention and 17 comparison schools were assigned; 29 are in the sample) and varied implementation.

Read that carefully. PARLO included reassessment, but also outcome-based grading, feedback, summer training, extra training days over two years, and monthly teacher meetings. It tested the package. It does not show that adding a retake to an ordinary points-based gradebook would move scores 13 percentile points. Linka and Guskey make the same point: in their review, no grading system by itself improves learning, and retaking a poorly aligned test will not either. Corrective instruction first, they argue, makes a second chance meaningful.

Source	Who was studied	What it found	Main caution
Kramer et al. (2025)	29 schools, mostly ninth-grade algebra and geometry; 2,736 students analyzed	+0.33 SD on an end-of-course assessment; about 13 percentile points	Whole grading package, not retakes alone; high school-level attrition
Emeka et al. (2023), test anxiety	Seven STEM courses at one large university; 448 of 2,102 students responded	Self-reported test anxiety fell from 22.7 to 17.7 on a 6–30 scale; 72% disagreed they studied less	21.3% response rate; self-reported; performance not measured
Herman et al. (2020)	One college STEM course	A 90/10 weighted average of two attempts raised take-up more than capped replacement; authors’ data suggest more learning	One course; read at record level, no numbers reported there
Jenkins & Hussein (2023)	Two engineering courses	Retake options linked to higher letter grades and fewer D/F grades	Abstract level; no sample sizes or statistics
Fordham/RAND teacher survey	Nearly 1,000 K–12 teachers	41% called unlimited retakes helpful; 37% harmful	Opinion, not outcomes; news report, no margin of error

Evidence on retake policies, compiled for this article. Every row is described in full, with its limits, in the Sources section.

The college evidence is more detailed and less relevant. Emeka and colleagues surveyed 2,102 students in seven STEM courses with second-chance exams. Of the 448 who responded, mean self-reported test anxiety fell from 22.7 to 17.7 on a 6–30 scale, 87 percent said they prepared for the first attempt to avoid needing another, and 72 percent disagreed that they studied less when a retake was available. That counters the fear that retakes breed laziness, with limits: respondents were mostly first- and second-year college students, only about one in five answered, and everything was self-reported.

Four-row graphic listing the kinds of evidence on retaking tests: one randomized trial in 29 mostly ninth-grade math schools, college course studies, national admission exams in Greece and Turkey, and a survey of nearly 1,000 K-12 teachers.

None of this is a controlled comparison, in a grade 6–12 classroom, of the same course with and without a retake option; among the sources read for this article, that comparison does not exist. Anyone who says the research proves retakes work, or proves they backfire, is stretching it.

What does the evidence against retakes say?

Three kinds of evidence cut the other way: exams where retakers compete with each other, a university that improved outcomes by cutting attempts, and educator warnings about workload. None studied an ordinary secondary classroom, but each names a failure mode a policy should plan for.

Start with national exams. In a study of Greek senior high school students, those who fell below a new minimum admission score could only gain access by retaking all exams the following year. Retakers improved by about half a standard deviation, yet did not land in clearly better courses; their rank gains disappeared against the students they actually competed with. The authors call the paper preliminary, covering one cohort.

A working paper on Turkey’s university placement exam models a similar result: because retakers raise cutoffs for everyone, limiting retaking would leave most students better off, even though gains between attempts were real (0.2 to 0.5 standard deviations). Both involve ranking for limited seats, so one student’s gain is another’s loss. A unit test has no seats; every student can earn an A. This is a mechanism to watch, not a description of your department.

The cleanest case for fewer attempts comes from a faculty at the University of Bologna, which cut the number of times a student could sit each first-year exam from six to three. Compared with related programs that did not change, first-year dropout fell about 4.2 percentage points and students earned about 11 more credits. The study covers 9,083 students at one prestigious faculty, the dropout result weakens under some statistical choices, and six attempts a year is far beyond what a secondary teacher would offer. One plausible reading, untested by the paper, is that very generous rules let students postpone the work.

Educators raise a different warning. Linka and Guskey call unlimited retakes “unrealistic” at the secondary level and warn of “burdensome workloads for teachers.” In the Fordham Institute and RAND survey of nearly 1,000 K–12 teachers, unlimited retakes were the most accepted of five equitable-grading policies, and the verdict was still split at 41 percent helpful to 37 percent harmful. That is opinion, not results; the news report gives no margin of error, and Joe Feldman, whose book the five policies come from, said the survey oversimplified his practices.

Students have their own list. In open-ended comments from students at one high school, complaints included that a worse retake score could replace a better original and that teachers applied the rules differently. The authors did not count comments by theme, so treat them as failure points, not frequencies.

The pattern is consistent. The problem is not that a second chance exists. It is a second chance that is unlimited, unstructured, or disconnected from new learning.

What should a retake policy decide in writing?

Six things: who is eligible, what the student does first, how many attempts are allowed, what the second test looks like, when it happens, and which score counts. Each unwritten decision becomes a case-by-case argument, and case-by-case arguments are where unfairness enters.

Decision	Defensible default for grades 6–12	What goes wrong without it
1. Eligibility	Offer it by rule to anyone below proficiency; others may opt in	Only families who know to ask use it
2. Entry step	Corrections with explanations, or a short study plan with practice evidence	A free second roll of the dice
3. Attempts	One retake per test; a second only after a conference	Endless cycles and an unmanageable marking load
4. Version	A parallel form: same standards, similar difficulty, new items	A memorized quiz, or a harder test that punishes the student
5. Window	A fixed window of about ten school days after the test comes back, long enough for students with jobs or family duties	Requests pile up at the end of the quarter
6. Which score counts	State one rule in advance; this guide defaults to the higher score	The “my retake was worse” surprise

A six-decision retake policy. Defaults are recommendations compiled for this article, not findings from a single study.

Most are judgment calls, but a few have logic behind them. Start with the entry step. The test corrections guide makes corrections the price of admission to a retake, and Linka and Guskey land in the same place. If the student never had the material, corrections amount to copying, so reteach first.

What about capping the retake score? Some college courses cap recovered credit, at 80 percent in one set of engineering sections and 90 percent in the exams Herman and colleagues compared. A cap is defensible, but it penalizes learning late. The entry step guards against gaming better because it demands new work rather than lowering the ceiling. Keep the retake rule consistent with your floor and deadline rules so students do not face contradictory systems.

The hardest decision is which score counts: the higher score, the most recent, or an average. Among 513 students in two sophomore engineering courses, preferences between a policy where grades cannot go down and one where they can were almost perfectly split. Those who liked the safety net said it eased test anxiety; those who liked the risk said it pushed them to study before the second exam. The high school comments show the other side: a retake that quietly lowered a grade was a surprise students resented.

Three-card graphic comparing which score counts after a retake: the higher score, the most recent score, and an average of both, with one strength and one risk for each.

No option is neutral, so the rule that matters is the one students can recite. This guide’s default is the higher score paired with a real entry step: it is simplest to explain, it removes the lower-score surprise, and the entry step screens out the careless second attempt. A department that prefers averaging should say so before the first test, not after the first retake.

Two checks before adopting any version: read your board’s grading policy, since a conflicting department rule will not survive an appeal, and apply the same accommodations to the retake that a student receives on the original.

What does a fair retake process look like, step by step?

A fair retake process has six steps: return the test with feedback, require an entry task, schedule inside a fixed window, use a parallel version, score against the same standard, and talk through the result. Write it once and apply it identically to every student.

Return the test with feedback tied to standards. Mark which skill each missed item measured. A student cannot prepare for a retake from a bare score.
Set the entry task. Corrections with a written explanation of each error, or a short study plan with practice evidence. Keep it small enough to finish in a night or two.
Let students sign up privately. A short form or a two-line message is enough. Do not announce who is retaking.
Build a parallel version. Same standards, comparable difficulty, new items, written with the original. Collect every copy so questions do not circulate.
Score against the same standard. Use the same rubric or answer-key logic, and apply the written rule for which score counts.
Close the loop. Tell the student what changed and what it did to the grade, and note the retake in the gradebook so families see the attempt. If it also falls short, hold a short conference and reteach the specific skill.

That is a lot of structure, and the structure is what lets you say yes without retakes eating the unit. In grades 6–8, shorten the entry task and the window, and have the teacher issue the invitation rather than relying on a student to remember to sign up. Step three borrows from the objections to standards-based grading: visible reassessing announces who struggled, and a policy nobody wants to be seen using is not working. Here is the whole policy as text students can read in thirty seconds.

Retake policy: If you score below proficient on a test, you may retake it once. First, complete your corrections or study plan and show them to me. Sign up within ten school days of getting the test back. The retake uses different questions on the same skills. The higher of your two scores goes in the gradebook. If you still need help after one retake, we will talk about next steps together.

How much work do retakes add for teachers?

More than most policies admit, and the load grows with attempts rather than with students. Every extra version must be written, administered, and scored. A cap, a fixed window, and an entry task are the three cheapest ways to keep the load from collapsing by midyear.

The arithmetic is illustrative, not measured. A teacher with 130 students who sees one in five ask for a retake has 26 extra papers to administer and score after a single test, plus a second version to write; three units closing in one month make it 78. Jenkins and Hussein discuss the extra instructor workload their policies created without quantifying it. The standards-based grading gradebook guide covers why reassessment is the real labor cost of that system.

Three practices keep the number manageable: write the parallel form with the original, from the same standards blueprint; share the item bank across a course team or district; and hold retakes in a slot that already exists, such as a flex block, instead of after-school sessions only some students can attend. Align the window with grade-reporting dates too.

For the semester exam, the parallel version does not have to be written at all. The free Midterm Maker at Mid-Terms.org builds a test from only the units you taught, lets you swap questions, and produces up to four scrambled versions (A–D) with matching answer keys, so the retake gets a different paper than the first attempt without a second evening of writing.

Will students game a retake policy, and is it fair to students who studied?

Some will test the edges, which is why a retake must be earned with an entry task. Students who studied lose nothing, because someone else’s retake does not lower their score unless grades are curved. Fairness comes from one visible path open to everyone.

The evidence on gaming is mixed and self-reported. In the Illinois survey, 87 percent said they prepared for the first attempt to avoid a retake, yet some high school students wrote that others abuse the ability to reassess. Both can be true. An entry task, an attempt cap, and a fixed window mean abuse costs the student effort instead of the class its time.

The fairness objection deserves respect, because it is usually a feeling about effort rather than points. Name it: their first score stands, another student’s retake does not change it, and they have the same path next time.

How do you keep retakes equitable?

Offer them by rule, not by request. A retake open only to students who ask favors students whose families already know the system. Publish the policy, offer the retake automatically below proficiency, and keep sign-up private so using it does not cost a student status.

The test corrections guide makes this point and it holds here: if a retake is available to anyone who asks, the students who ask are the students whose families know to ask. Automatic offers solve that. So does a written policy sent home at the start of the course, which answers the first question most parents have: is the rule predictable and the same for every child?

Consistency across teachers matters just as much. In the high school comments, students described teachers who allowed reassessment sometimes, others always, and some never, and windows that opened only near the end of the quarter. A short department-level policy removes the perception that retakes depend on whose class you are in.

Finally, treat the student as the decision maker. Explain why the rule exists, let the student choose whether to use it, and ask for their plan rather than prescribing one. That is a higher standard in a gradebook: a clear expectation, a real consequence, and a way back the student has to walk.

So, should students be allowed to retake tests?

Yes, when a retake is earned through new learning, measures the same standards, is capped, and follows one written rule for every student. Without those conditions the real question is not whether students may retake but whether the grade means anything.

The research cannot settle this for you. It marks the edges: structured reassessment inside a supported system has the best K–12 evidence, unlimited and unstructured attempts draw the most warnings, and everything in between is a decision your department has to make and write down.

If your team is stuck, start with one question: what does a student have to do between the first test and the second? Once that is written, caps, windows, versions, and scoring tend to fall into place. Then measure your own results: after a semester, count who retook, who improved, and whether the numbers differ by teacher or student group. That is better evidence for your school than any study above.

A retake and a mastery cycle are not the same thing. In mastery learning, corrective instruction happens between the two attempts; a second attempt with no teaching in between is just a retake, and it makes its case on different grounds than the ones here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should students be allowed to retake tests?

Yes, in most secondary classrooms, as long as the retake is earned and the rules are written down. A fair policy requires corrections or a study plan first, uses a parallel version of the test, limits attempts, and states which score counts. Unlimited, on-demand retakes with no requirement are where the policy tends to fail.

Does allowing retakes make students study less?

The evidence is limited and mostly self-reported. In a survey of college STEM students whose courses offered second-chance exams, 87 percent said they prepared for the first attempt to avoid needing another, and 72 percent disagreed that they studied less. That group is older than yours, so keep an entry task and an attempt cap as protection.

Should a retake replace the original score or be averaged?

Either can work if students know the rule before the first test. Taking the higher score is simplest to explain and avoids the surprise of a worse retake lowering a grade. Averaging rewards the first attempt more but can discourage students. In one survey of engineering students, preferences between a no-risk policy and a can-go-down policy were almost evenly split.

How many times should a student be allowed to retake a test?

Once is a sound default for grades 6-12, with a second attempt only after a conference and new reteaching. Unlimited retakes are the most contested version: teachers in a national survey split 41 percent helpful to 37 percent harmful, and researchers warn of burdensome workloads. A cap keeps the policy sustainable and the first attempt meaningful.

Should the retake be the same test?

No. Use a parallel version that measures the same standards at similar difficulty with new items. Giving the identical test measures memory of the test, while a noticeably harder test punishes the student for needing a second chance. Writing the parallel form at the same time as the original keeps preparation time manageable.

How do I explain a retake policy to parents?

Put it in writing at the start of the course and send it home: who can retake, what the student must do first, how many attempts exist, the window, and which score counts. Say it applies to every student the same way, and keep individual retake results private. Parents mostly want a predictable, fair rule.

What if a student fails the retake too?

Treat it as information, not a reason for an automatic third attempt. Hold a short conference to find what is missing, reteach that specific skill, and decide on a next step together. If many students fall short, check the original instruction and how well the test matches the standards.

Do the same rules apply to students with accommodations?

Yes. A retake should follow the same accommodations a student receives on the original test, such as extended time or a read-aloud, and the entry task should be adjusted if its format creates a barrier. The retake is not a way to shorten or dilute the standard; it is a second look at the same learning.

Sources

Kramer, S. L., Posner, M. A., Browman, A. S., Lawrence, N. R., Roem, J., & Krier, K. (2025). The impacts of a standards-based grading system emphasizing formative assessment, feedback, and re-assessment: A mixed methods, cluster randomized control trial in ninth grade mathematics classrooms. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 18(1), 56–87. Read through the What Works Clearinghouse study review, not the journal article. 29 schools, 2,736 students analyzed, effect 0.33, improvement index 13 percentile points. Caveats the review states: rated meets standards with reservations; high cluster-level attrition; teachers developed their own outcomes and routines; free/reduced-price lunch status recorded as unknown for the whole sample. The program bundled reassessment with outcome-based grading and extensive teacher training, so the result is not a test of retakes alone.
Emeka, C. A., Zilles, C., West, M., Herman, G. L., & Bretl, T. (2023). Second-chance testing as a means of reducing students’ test anxiety and improving outcomes. ASEE Annual Conference. Seven STEM courses at a large Midwestern public university; 448 of 2,102 surveyed students responded; 23 interviews. Caveats the authors state: self-reported anxiety recalled across two hypothetical conditions, adapted six-item scale with a ceiling effect, 21.3% response rate, no pretest or posttest. Performance was not measured in this study.
Herman, G. L., Cai, Z., Bretl, T., Zilles, C., & West, M. (2020). Comparison of grade replacement and weighted averages for second-chance exams. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, 56–66. Read at record level: the page reports the design (90% cap with replacement versus a 90/10 weighted average) and conclusions but no effect sizes or sample sizes. One STEM course; quasi-experimental.
Emeka, C. A., Smith, D. H., Zilles, C., West, M., Herman, G. L., & Bretl, T. (2023). Determining the best policies for second-chance tests for STEM students. ASEE Annual Conference. Read at record level: 513 survey respondents in two sophomore engineering courses; student preference between the two policies was almost perfectly split. No percentages or performance statistics appear in the record.
Jenkins, J. M., & Hussein, F. (2023). Implementation of a retake policy: Who benefits? ASEE Annual Conference. Read at abstract level: two engineering courses at one anonymized university, retakes capped at 80 percent in the statics course, reported gains in letter grades and fewer D/F (or C/F) grades. The abstract reports no sample sizes or statistics.
Bizopoulou, A., Megalokonomou, R., & Simion, Ş. (2022). Do second chances pay off? Evidence from a natural experiment with low-achieving students. IZA Discussion Paper 15139. Greek national admission exams, roughly 14,500 students near the threshold in the main analysis, fuzzy regression discontinuity. Caveats the authors state: discussion paper (preliminary), one cohort in one country, offers rather than enrollment, some weak subgroup results. This is a policy where retaking was the only route to admission; it is not a classroom retake.
Krishna, K., Lychagin, S., & Frisancho, V. (2017). Retaking in high stakes exams: Is less more? IDB Working Paper 758. Turkey’s university placement exam, 31,554 science-track students; structural model with policy simulations. Caveats the authors state: one track with competitive admissions, results depend on estimated parameters, model omits longer-term learning benefits. A working paper, not a classroom study.
Bratti, M., Granato, S., & Havari, E. (2024). Another chance: Number of exam retakes and university students’ outcomes. IZA Discussion Paper 17400. Faculty of Economics, University of Bologna; 9,083 students; difference-in-differences. Caveats the authors state: single prestigious institution, dropout counts only students leaving that university, the dropout result is not significant under some inference choices, long-term outcomes are exploratory. The paper does not test the mechanism offered in the text.
Linka, L. J., & Guskey, T. R. (2022). Is standards-based grading effective? Theory Into Practice. A review, not an experiment. Quoted for the cautions on unlimited retakes and for the statement that no grading system by itself improves learning. The paper concludes there is little empirical evidence for the benefits some proponents claim for multiple reassessment opportunities.
A thousand teachers were asked about equitable grading. Most didn’t like it. The 74. Read as a news report of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and RAND survey, not the report itself. Nearly 1,000 K–12 teachers; 41% helpful and 37% harmful for unlimited retakes. Caveats: the five policies were chosen because they are controversial and are five of 14 practices examined; Joe Feldman said the survey misrepresented his practices; the article gives no margin of error.
Peters, R., Kruse, J., Buckmiller, T., & Townsley, M. (2017). “It’s just not fair!” Making sense of secondary students’ complaints about standards-based grading American Secondary Education, 45(3). Qualitative analysis of anonymous student comments at one high school of about 478 students; themes were not quantified. Used only for the kinds of complaints students raised.
Editorial note. The six decisions, the six steps, the sample policy text, the one-in-five workload illustration and the default of the higher score are compiled for this article. They are recommendations, not a report of any teacher’s classroom, and no study above tests them as a set.

About Clay Shumate

October 28, 2026

Extra Credit Ideas for Grades 6–12: Which Ones Are Defensible and Which Ones Distort the Grade

By Clay Shumate

Extra credit ideas are defensible when the points measure the same learning the grade reports, every student can earn them during school time, and required work stays required. In-class bonus items, deeper extensions, and second chances at the same standard pass. Supplies, event attendance, and behavior points distort the grade.

Key Takeaways

Extra credit is defensible only when its points measure the same learning the grade claims to report. Points for supplies, event attendance, signed forms, or behavior measure something else, and the grade stops meaning what families think it means.
The research is thin and nearly all of it comes from college courses. In one introductory biology course, the students who did extra credit were already attending more and earning higher grades with the bonus points removed, which suggests extra credit mostly reached students who were already doing well.
Three questions sort every idea: does it measure the same standard, can every student earn it in school time, and does required work stay required? Five common ideas pass and six fail.
A retake, a correction, or a revision after relearning does what extra credit promises without trading one kind of evidence for another.
If a school expects extra credit, write the rules before the term, cap the points, tie them to a current standard, and close the window well before grades are due.

What is extra credit, and why does it cause so many grading arguments?

Extra credit is any work that adds points to a student’s grade beyond the assigned work. The arguments start because those points can mean two different things: more evidence of learning, or payment for something unrelated to learning. What the points are for decides whether the idea is defensible.

Almost every teacher gets asked for it. A student has a 68 in late November, a parent writes an email, a colleague offers a packet, and saying yes starts to look generous. The harder question is what the grade is supposed to say once those points are in it.

That question matters because grades already carry more than most people assume. A research review of more than a century of grading studies by Susan Brookhart and seven co-authors describes grades as assessing “a multidimensional construct containing both cognitive and noncognitive factors.” In plain terms, teachers’ marks already blend achievement with effort and behavior. The review is not about extra credit, but the inference is hard to avoid: every unrelated point source added to a gradebook blurs the signal a little further. That inference is mine, not the authors’.

Graphic titled Three questions every extra credit idea must pass, showing three numbered cards: same standard, open to every student, and required work still required.

Three tests sort the ideas in the rest of this article. They are a working framework, not a research finding, built from the accuracy, bias, and motivation arguments in Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity as summarized by the Oregon State Ecampus course-development blog, and from the conditions a middle school teacher lists in an Education Week opinion column. The first test asks whether the points measure the same standard the grade reports. The second asks whether every student can earn them, in school, with what school provides. The third asks whether required work is still required, or whether the points can quietly stand in for it.

What does the research say about extra credit?

Very little research tests extra credit directly, and none of the sources opened for this article tests it in grades 6–12. The college-level studies suggest extra credit mostly reaches students who are already doing well. None of them shows that it helps students who are behind.

Here is what each source covers, including what it cannot tell a teacher of grades 6–12.

Source	Who was studied	What it found	What it cannot tell you
Journal of College Science Teaching, introductory science courses	One introductory biology course (the page I could read does not give the number of students)	81 percent said they would submit extra credit; fewer than a quarter did. Those who did attended more, used optional help sessions more, and earned higher grades, even with the extra points removed.	Whether extra credit caused any improvement. The pattern looks like selection.
Padilla-Walker, daily extra credit quizzes	An advanced psychology course of 36 students	Performance on the daily quizzes predicted exam scores after controlling for gender, college GPA, and ACT scores. Nearly half of students said their main reason was earning points.	Cause and effect. It is a small predictive study, not an experiment.
Myers and Hatchel, personality and cognitive factors	276 undergraduates in psychology and biology courses, surveyed after final exams	79.7 percent completed at least some extra credit. Completing it showed no significant main effect on academic self-efficacy or metacognition; differences appeared only in combination with course level and final grade.	Learning gains. The extra credit was mostly easy tasks, such as attending an event with a short write-up or joining a research study.
Brookhart and colleagues, review of grading research	More than a century of grading studies, K–12 and higher education	Grades blend cognitive and noncognitive factors.	Anything about extra credit specifically.
Oregon State Ecampus course-development blog and the Education Week opinion column	Practitioner arguments; no empirical sample	Course designers and teachers argue for and against extra credit. Feldman reports that higher-achieving, better-resourced students are more likely to use it.	Anything checkable. The blog cites one book, and the column’s one research claim names no study.

Every source in this table was opened before it was cited. Study populations are named because only the grading review includes K–12 classrooms.

Read together, the sources point in one direction and stop short of a conclusion. The biology finding is a selection pattern: the students who completed extra credit were the students already attending class and using help sessions, and they still had higher grades without the bonus points. That fits the claim Feldman makes in Education Week, that stronger and better-resourced students use extra credit more. His claim comes with no named study, though, so it is an argument the biology finding happens to fit, not a replicated result.

There is evidence for the other side, and it deserves its weight. Padilla-Walker’s daily quizzes were tied to course content, and students who did well on them did well on exams, with gender, college GPA, and ACT scores accounted for. That is the best case for extra credit in this set: regular extra practice on the same material. But it is a prediction in 36 students, and the fact that nearly half said they were doing it for the points shows how the incentive works. It makes “more practice on the same standard” look promising. It does not show that adding points is what made the difference.

The null result from Myers and Hatchel matters for a different reason. Across 276 undergraduates, completing extra credit by itself showed no significant effect on academic self-efficacy or metacognition. Their extra credit was mostly easy tasks such as attending an event with a short write-up or taking part in a research study. One study cannot show that such extra credit does nothing, but it gives no reason to expect it to build the habits teachers hope it will.

The honest summary for a classroom in grades 6–12: the evidence does not support extra credit as a way to help students who are behind, and it does not show harm either. What it supports is narrower. Extra credit tied to the same content and done during school has the best case, and it is also the version that looks least like “extra.”

Which extra credit ideas are defensible?

Five ideas pass all three tests: bonus items built into an assessment, a deeper extension of a current standard, a reassessment after relearning, test corrections with an explanation, and a revision cycle on a project. Each ties the points to the same learning the grade reports.

Bonus items built into the assessment. One or two optional items at the end of a quiz or test ask for a harder version of the same standard. Everyone sees them, everyone has the same time, and the points are small enough that they cannot rescue a student who skipped the required work. Write the standard next to each bonus item before the test is given; if the standard cannot be named, the item fails the first test. Deliver bonus items with the same accommodations the assessment already carries, so a student with extended time or read-aloud support is not shut out of the points. A few points out of a hundred is a reasonable ceiling, though that number is a judgment call, not a research finding.

A deeper extension of a current standard. A veteran middle school reading teacher quoted in Education Week describes extra credit that analyzes literary devices in song lyrics or commercials during a figurative language unit, or critiques a real-world text during persuasive writing, and says extra credit “should extend learning, not excuse it.” The same idea works in any subject: one more step of the same skill, at a higher level, scored with the same rubric, during a work period rather than as homework only some students can finish. Letting students choose which of two standards to extend gives them a voice without changing the test.

A reassessment after relearning. A student who missed a standard shows evidence of relearning, attempts it again, and the new score replaces the old one. The grade moves because the student learned something. Evidence of relearning can be a short conference, completed practice, or a corrected explanation, anything the student produces that shows what changed between attempts. Standards-based grading builds this in, and this site’s explainer on standards-based grading covers what it fixes and what the evidence shows.

Test corrections that require an explanation. A correction counts only when the student explains why the original answer was wrong and what the right reasoning is. Without the explanation, corrections hand points back. The article on making test corrections teach walks through how to set that up.

A revision cycle on a project. The Oregon State blog’s recommended replacement for extra credit is revise-and-resubmit, which supports learning from mistakes, shows growth over time, and gives students who face barriers another chance. A revision after feedback on a project draft is the strongest fit for project-based classrooms.

Each of these is better described as a second chance than as extra credit, and that is the point. The ideas that survive scrutiny are the ones that stop being extra.

Extra credit idea	Same standard as the grade?	Every student can earn it in school?	Required work stays required?	Verdict
Bonus items on the assessment	Yes	Yes	Yes, if capped	Defensible
Deeper extension done in class	Yes	Yes	Yes	Defensible
Reassessment after relearning	Yes	Yes	Yes	Defensible
Test corrections with an explanation	Yes	Yes	Yes	Defensible
Revision cycle on a project	Yes	Yes	Yes	Defensible
Bring tissues, sanitizer, or supplies	No	No (depends on family budget)	No	Distorts
Attend a school or community event	No	No (transportation, time, childcare)	No	Distorts
Return a signed form	No	No (depends on adult responsiveness)	No	Distorts
Behavior or perfect-attendance points	No	No (illness, family circumstances)	No	Distorts
End-of-term makeup packet	Rarely	Partly	No	Distorts
Whole-class bonus for a group goal	No	No (one student’s absence affects everyone)	No	Distorts

Eleven common extra credit ideas rated against the three tests. The tests are a working framework for this article, not a research instrument.

Which extra credit ideas distort the grade?

Extra credit distorts the grade when the points reward something other than learning: supplies, event attendance, signed forms, behavior, a last-week packet, or a group bonus. These ideas favor students with money, transportation, or adult support, and they let points cover gaps in required work.

Supplies. Bringing tissues, sanitizer, or classroom supplies sorts students by what a family can afford. A grade that rises with a purchase is reporting a household budget.

Graphic titled Five that pass, six that distort, listing five defensible extra credit ideas such as bonus items on the assessment and reassessment after relearning, and six distorting ideas such as supplies, event attendance, and signed forms.

Event attendance. The Oregon State blog notes that extra credit tied to outside events can exclude students who lack money, transportation, childcare, or time. Even a free event assumes a ride home and an evening the student controls, and events off campus or after hours raise supervision and transportation questions that the school, not a fourteen-year-old, should own.

Signed forms. Points for returning a form report whether an adult was home and responsive. The student does not control that, and the grade should not depend on it.

Behavior and attendance points. Good behavior and perfect attendance may deserve recognition. They do not belong in the same number as achievement. The Brookhart review shows how much grades already mix the two, and extra points for behavior mix them again. Recognition outside the gradebook solves the same problem without blurring the grade.

End-of-term packets. The Oregon State blog describes end-of-term extra credit as shifting focus toward grades: students either chase points or use extra credit to cover a weak area, and can stop learning that material. A packet in the last week is a grade-repair tool wearing a different name.

Whole-class bonuses. A bonus for the whole class if everyone passes makes one student’s absence or bad day a cost to everyone else’s grade. If the goal is team spirit, it belongs in a reward, not in the gradebook.

In each case the points arrive for something other than showing what a student knows, and the result is a number that means less.

What works better than extra credit?

A second chance at the same standard works better: a retake after relearning, corrections that require an explanation, a revise-and-resubmit on a project, and a clear late-work policy. The grade rises only when the student shows the learning the grade was meant to report.

Feldman’s rule of thumb, quoted in the Oregon State blog, is a useful filter: “If the work is important, require it; if it’s not, don’t include it in the grade.” An extra credit activity worth doing probably belongs in the required work. One not worth requiring probably does not belong in the grade. The Maine Department of Education’s study guide for the book asks readers the same question: why are the activities offered as extra credit not simply part of the curriculum? In the Education Week column, Feldman’s alternative is to require valuable tasks, allow redos instead of substitutes, and leave unrelated tasks out of grades.

Graphic titled Second chance at the same standard in four steps, showing four numbered cards: name the missed standard, show evidence of relearning, reassess the same standard, and replace the old score.

The pieces already exist on this site. The article on no-zero grading policy covers the math when a score is missing. The late work policy guide covers what the evidence supports now that the famous study behind many deadline rules has been retracted. Together with corrections and reassessment, they are the practical alternatives to extra credit for most classrooms.

Second chances cost grading time, and an honest article has to say so. Keep the workload manageable by opening one reassessment window per unit instead of accepting retakes whenever someone asks, by requiring evidence of relearning before the second attempt, and by capping the number of attempts. The evidence requirement also filters requests: a student who will not complete a practice set was not ready to retake the test anyway. A bonus item at the end of an assessment costs no extra class time at all, which is part of its appeal on an ordinary Tuesday.

Some teachers worry that students will not attempt enrichment once extra credit assignments disappear. That question is open. None of the sources opened for this article tests whether students still choose optional work when it earns nothing. A reasonable way to find out is to offer one optional challenge with feedback and no points, and see who takes it.

How do you set up extra credit if your school expects it?

Write the rules before the term, tie every opportunity to a current standard, run it during class time, cap the points, announce it to everyone at once, and close it well before grades are due. Those six steps keep extra credit attached to learning instead of negotiation.

Write the rules before the term starts. Put what counts, how many points it can add, and when it closes in the syllabus. A policy written in December in response to one request is a favor, not a policy.
Tie every opportunity to a current standard. The middle school teacher in the Education Week column says extra credit should be connected to the standards students are working on now, and kept short enough for busy students.
Run it during class time. Anything done only at home or off site sorts students by circumstances. A work period gives every student the same time and the same materials.
Cap the points. Choose a ceiling low enough that extra credit cannot replace missing required work. The ceiling is a judgment call; none of the sources opened for this article sets a number.
Announce it to everyone at once, including families. The same teacher tells parents when she offers extra credit and has students track their own credit.
Close it well before grades are due. A closing date several weeks before the term ends keeps extra credit from turning into last-week grade repair. The same teacher keeps deadlines firm.

Check the school’s grading policy first. Some schools and districts limit or ban extra credit, and this article describes practice, not policy. Announce any change before the term begins. Removing extra credit in the middle of a term turns a policy into a grievance, and families will reasonably ask why the rules moved.

Consistency matters at the school level too. If two teachers of the same course run different extra credit rules, a student’s grade depends on which room the student landed in. The middle school teacher in the Education Week column aligns with colleagues who teach the same content for this reason. It is also worth tracking who actually uses extra credit each term. If the same students use it every time, the policy is sorting students rather than helping them.

How is extra credit different from rewards and incentives?

Extra credit adds points to the grade. A reward does not. A free-choice day, a pass, or a note home changes the experience of class without changing what the grade reports. Keeping the two separate protects the meaning of the grade and still lets a teacher say thank you.

The guide to classroom incentives covers when incentives help and how to fade them, and the list of free classroom rewards collects twenty ideas for grades 6–12. Neither needs a gradebook entry.

A practical test: if a student is absent for the activity, does the grade change? If it does, the activity is extra credit and has to pass the three tests. If it does not, it is a reward and can be as playful as the class likes.

What should you tell students and parents about extra credit?

Tell them what extra credit counts for, when it opens and closes, and that every student gets the same chance at it. Put those three facts in writing at the start of the term so a request in December does not become a negotiation.

A written policy means no student has to ask for a favor, and it removes any suspicion that extra credit goes to whoever pushes hardest. Parents usually want to know how the grade is calculated and whether their child has a fair chance. A paragraph in the syllabus and a note home handle both. Label extra credit as its own category in the gradebook so a family can see how many points came from it. Post the opportunity, not the list of who has or has not taken it, because each student’s record is that student’s business.

Sample wording that fits on one slide: “Extra credit is a chance to show more of the same learning, in class, for every student. It is not a way around required work.” When a parent asks in December, point to the policy first, then to what is open: corrections, a retake, or a revision, with the date each closes.

Write the policy in plain language, and offer a translated copy where families need one. A student who has to decode the rules to use them is already at a disadvantage, which defeats the purpose of making extra credit open to everyone.

Clay’s take: give students a second chance at the same standard, not a bonus on a different one

My view as a teacher of grades 6–12: the best extra credit policy is the one that makes extra credit unnecessary. A student who missed a standard should get a clear path to show it later, and the grade should move only when that learning does.

I would not ban a small, in-class bonus item, because it adds evidence of the same standard. I would drop everything else on the distorting list and put the saved effort into a better retake process, one that asks for evidence of relearning before the second attempt. That requirement is the interesting part, because it turns a grade request into a learning plan.

Dignity is the part that rarely gets discussed. When a student has to ask for extra credit, the student is asking for a favor. A second-chance system with a published process lets students fix their own mistakes by following steps anyone can read, which treats them as capable of ownership instead of as petitioners.

What to do next

Start with an audit: list the extra credit ideas currently in use, run each through the three questions, and keep only the ideas that pass. Then replace the rest with a published second-chance process.

List every current extra credit option and rate it against the three tests in the table above.
Replace each failing idea with a retake, correction, or revision for the same standard.
Publish the rules, the point cap, and the closing date for students and families before the next term.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is extra credit fair to students who already have an A?

Extra credit is fair when every student can earn it and the points measure the same learning as the grade. It becomes unfair when the points go mostly to students who are already doing well, the pattern one introductory biology course showed. Capping the points and tying them to a current standard keeps high grades honest.

Should extra credit ever raise a failing grade?

Extra credit should not rescue a failing grade, because it cannot replace evidence of required learning. A student who is failing needs a path back to the missed standards: relearning, then a retake or revision. If extra points can lift a failing grade to a pass, the point cap is set too high.

Is a test retake the same thing as extra credit?

A retake is not extra credit. A retake asks for the same standard again, and the new evidence replaces the old score. Extra credit adds points from a different source. That difference matters because a retake changes the grade only when the student shows learning the first attempt missed.

How do you keep second chances from burying you in grading?

Open one reassessment window per unit instead of accepting retakes at any time, require evidence of relearning before the second attempt, and cap the number of attempts. The evidence requirement filters out requests from students who have not done any new learning, and the window lets a teacher grade retakes in one batch.

What if my school or district bans or requires extra credit?

Follow the school’s grading policy first, since some schools and districts limit or ban extra credit and others expect it. Where it is allowed, use the three tests in this article to shape it: the same standard as the grade, open to every student in school, and capped so required work stays required.

Why shouldn’t students earn extra credit for supplies or events?

Points for supplies, event attendance, or signed forms depend on a family’s money, transportation, or availability, not on what the student learned. The grade then reports household circumstances. Rewards outside the gradebook, such as free-choice time or a note home, can thank students without changing what the grade says.

Do bonus items follow a student’s testing accommodations?

Bonus items built into an assessment should be given with the same accommodations the assessment already carries, such as extended time or read-aloud support, so students with documented needs can earn the points. Confirm the details with the special education team, because accommodations are set student by student.

How can families see how much of a grade came from extra credit?

Ask the teacher to label extra credit as its own category in the gradebook, with the cap and closing date in the syllabus. That lets a family see how many points came from extra credit and how many came from the required work, and it keeps one student’s record from being compared with another’s.

Sources

Brookhart, S. M., Guskey, T. R., Bowers, A. J., McMillan, J. H., Smith, J. K., Smith, L. F., Stevens, M. T., & Welsh, M. E. “A Century of Grading Research: Meaning and Value in the Most Common Educational Measure.” Review of Educational Research 86(4), 803–848. Read at the repository-record and abstract level only. The abstract describes grades as a multidimensional construct with cognitive and noncognitive factors; it does not discuss extra credit. The full text was not opened.
Padilla-Walker, L. M. “The Impact of Daily Extra Credit Quizzes on Exam Performance.” Teaching of Psychology 33, 236–239. Read at the abstract level. One advanced psychology course, 36 students; predictive analysis, not an experiment.
“Research and Teaching: Who Does Extra-Credit Work in Introductory Science Courses?” Journal of College Science Teaching (NSTA). Read at the abstract level. One introductory biology course; the page does not list authors or the number of students. Shows selection, not cause.
Myers, C. A., & Hatchel, J. M. “Personality and Cognitive Factors Related to Completing Extra Credit Assignments.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 13(2), Article 7. Abstract and results read in full. 276 undergraduates; no significant main effect of completing extra credit. Despite the title, the paper measures no personality traits.
Naxer, M. “Assessment Design: The Case Against Extra Credit.” Oregon State University Ecampus, Inspire blog. Practitioner argument, not research. The post cites one book, Feldman’s Grading for Equity, and describes no empirical studies.
Ferlazzo, L. “Should Teachers Offer Extra Credit? Yea or Nay?” Education Week, Classroom Q&A (opinion). Opinion column with a middle school teacher (for) and Joe Feldman (against). Feldman’s one research claim names no study; neither contributor cites data.
Maine Department of Education. Study guide, Grading for Equity, Chapter 9. A summary of Feldman’s chapter, cited as a summary. The book itself was not opened, so Feldman’s claims are reported second-hand.
Editorial note. the three tests, the eleven-idea ratings, the five defensible ideas, the six-step setup list, the four-step second-chance process, and the point-cap suggestions are compiled for this article and are recommendations, not a report of any teacher’s classroom. No study opened for this article tests extra credit in grades 6–12, and none tests these ideas as a set.

About Clay Shumate

October 28, 2026

No Zero Grading Policy: The Math, the Evidence, and the Part Schools Get Wrong
By Clay Shumate

A no zero grading policy replaces a score of zero for missing or failed work with a floor, usually 50 on a 100-point scale. It exists because a zero costs a student roughly six letter-grade intervals while every passing grade costs one. The floor fixes that arithmetic. It does not, on its own, get the work done.

Key Takeaways
- The argument for a grading floor is arithmetic, not sympathy. On a 100-point scale where 65 passes, the failing band is about two-thirds of the scale while each passing letter grade gets roughly ten points, so a single zero carries a penalty no passing grade can match.
- The largest study of minimum grading in practice looked at 343,425 sets of grades given to 10,958 students over seven years in one urban high school with a 50 floor, and found no grade inflation. Only 0.3 percent of grade sets started with a minimum grade and ended in a pass.
- The strongest evidence on the other side is about grading standards, not grading floors. Across 342,098 North Carolina Algebra I students, the strictest-grading quarter of teachers raised same-year test scores by 16.9 percent of a standard deviation over the most lenient quarter.
- Nobody has run a controlled trial of a no zero grading policy. The leading critique of equitable grading concedes it cites no study measuring the effects of minimum grading itself, and the leading defense comes from one school’s retrospective records. Anyone who tells you the question is settled is selling something.
- A floor without a required redo is the version that earns the criticism. The policy that holds up pairs the 50 with a recorded reason, a deadline for the real work, and a grade that still says the student has not shown the learning yet.
Every school argument about zeros collapses into the same two sentences. One side says a zero is the only honest score for work that does not exist. The other says a zero is a punishment dressed up as a measurement. Both sides are partly right, and both sides usually skip the part that decides it, which is what the number does to the average afterward.

So, in order: what the policy is, the arithmetic that started the fight, what the research on both sides actually found, and the five conditions that separate a defensible floor from a free pass.

What is a no zero grading policy?

A no zero grading policy is a grading rule that sets a minimum score for any assignment, so that missing or failed work is entered as that minimum rather than as a zero. On a 100-point scale the floor is almost always 50. The work is still unfinished and the grade is still an F. Only the size of the hole changes.

Three versions get called by the same name, and they are not the same policy. The first is a bare floor: nothing is entered below 50, and that is the end of it. The second is a floor plus a required redo, where the 50 is a placeholder until the student submits the work. The third replaces the number entirely with an incomplete or a not-yet code until the assignment arrives.

When a teacher tells you a no zero policy ruined their class, they almost always mean the first version. When an administrator tells you it transformed their school, they almost always mean the second. The two groups are arguing about different rules.

Why does one zero do so much damage on a 100-point scale?

A zero is the only score on a 100-point scale that can outweigh a semester of work, because the scale is not evenly divided. A, B, C and D each occupy about ten points. F occupies everything from 64 down to nothing. A zero is not one grade worse than a D; it is about six intervals worse.

Carifio and Carey put the point plainly in the Mid-Western Educational Researcher: a disproportionate two-thirds of the 100-point scale represents a failing grade, which concentrates every bit of teacher-to-teacher variation at the bottom end of the scale, where it does the most damage. Their summary of the underlying problem is the best sentence written on the subject: “The core and unavoidable problem is the effects of intermittent catastrophic failures.”

Run the arithmetic on an ordinary grades 6–12 student. Four assignments at 88, 92, 85 and 90 is an average of 88.75, a solid B+. Add one missing fifth assignment and watch what the two choices do.

Entry for the missing work New average Letter Perfect scores needed to climb back to an 80
Zero 71.0 C 3
50 floor 81.0 B 0 — already there
Dropped from the average 88.75 B+ 0
Four scores of 88, 92, 85 and 90, plus one missing assignment. Plain arithmetic, not a finding.

One missing assignment out of five takes a B+ student to a C, and climbing back to a B takes three more perfect scores that most grading periods do not contain. That is the whole case for the floor, and it is a case about mathematics rather than effort or character. It is also why a four-level scale changes the shape of the problem — though Carifio and Carey note a 0.0–4.0 scale only solves the asymmetry if its minimum is 1.0 rather than zero. The spacing is what matters, not the scale.

Same student, same missing assignment, three different entries.

What does the research on minimum grading actually show?

The only large-scale study of a school-wide minimum grade found no grade inflation and almost no social promotion. Carifio and Carey analyzed seven years of grading records from one large urban high school with a 50 floor: 343,425 sets of grades across 10,958 students. They report finding no evidence of grade inflation or social promotion.

The specific numbers matter more than the headline. Only 1,159 grade sets, about 0.3 percent, began with a minimum grade and ended with a passing grade, which is the exact outcome critics predict and it barely happened. 925 students, 8.4 percent of the school, passed at least one course after receiving a minimum grade somewhere along the way, roughly 142 students a year. The authors also report that after adjusting for GPA, students who received minimum grades outperformed peers who never received one on Massachusetts state exams.

Now the honest caveats, because this is the study everybody quotes and nobody qualifies. Carifio and Carey are advocates for minimum grading, and the article I read is their own point-counterpoint defense of it. It is one school, retrospective records, and no control condition. The design can tell you what happened in a building that adopted the floor. It cannot tell you that the floor caused it.

What does the evidence against lenient grading show?

The strongest evidence against lenient grading is about how hard teachers grade, not about whether zeros are allowed. Seth Gershenson tracked 342,098 eighth and ninth grade Algebra I students across about 8,000 North Carolina teachers over ten years and found that students of the strictest-grading quarter of teachers scored 16.9 percent of a standard deviation higher on the end-of-course exam than students of the most lenient quarter.

The effect carried forward. Those students scored 7.3 percent of a standard deviation higher in Geometry a year later and 8.6 percent higher in Algebra II two years later. It held across subgroups at roughly the same size: 8.2 percent for Black students, 10.3 percent for white students, 10.4 percent for Hispanic students, with the subgroup differences not statistically significant. The effect was slightly larger in less-affluent schools than in more-affluent ones.

That is a serious result and I am not going to soften it. But read what the study says about its own reach. Gershenson states that “the mechanism that leads from higher standards to higher performance is not clear,” and the report does not study no-zero or grade-floor policies at all. Its only mention of them sits in the implications section as a policy argument, not a tested finding. Grading harder on the work students do hand in is a different variable from what you enter when they hand in nothing.

The fullest critique of the wider equitable-grading movement comes from Meredith Coffey and Adam Tyner at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and it is worth reading because it is specific. They assemble real evidence that grades have drifted from achievement: an average ACT-tested GPA of 3.4 in 2021, the highest on record, against composite scores at their lowest since 2010, and TNTP’s finding that students earned the same grade or better in 2022 as in 2019 despite losing about five months of learning. They also cite Figlio and Lucas on stricter-grading teachers producing greater test-score growth, and Babcock’s finding that college students expecting a C studied about 50 percent more than those expecting an A.

And then they concede the thing the headlines left out. The brief cites no study measuring the effects of minimum grading itself, acknowledges that “it is difficult to quantify the impact of these specific grading reforms on national grading standards,” and allows that “some grading reforms may benefit students.” Its strongest line against the reforms, that there is “not an iota of hard evidence” they help long term, is a claim about missing evidence rather than a finding of harm.

So the state of the field is this. Nobody has randomized a no zero grading policy. One side has a large retrospective study from an advocate. The other side has strong evidence about a related but different variable and an openly stated absence of evidence about this one. That is not a tie, and it is not a victory. It means the decision has to be made on design and on values, with the evidence informing it rather than deciding it.

Every sample named, including what each one cannot tell you.

Does a no zero grading policy mean students stop being accountable?

A floor removes one consequence, and if nothing replaces it, accountability does drop. That is the legitimate complaint and it should not be waved away. Teachers at Leominster Public Schools in Massachusetts concluded that “kids just weren’t learning to be responsible” and the district rescinded its policy, and one teacher in the same reporting described students who could “take half of a year off and still pass.”

Notice what those complaints are about. Not the number 50 — the missing second half of the policy. A 50 that requires nothing is a gift; a 50 that holds a slot open until the work arrives is a deadline with a different shape. There is also a real argument that a zero was never much of a consequence to begin with. Sarah Duncan of the University of Chicago’s Network for College Success noted in the same reporting that students who get an F tend to withdraw, because “they interpret an F as ‘You do not belong in this environment.’” A consequence that makes a student quit is working as an exit, not a consequence.

What should a no zero grading policy actually require?

Five conditions separate a defensible floor from a free pass, and all five are about what happens after the 50 goes in the book. A policy with the floor and none of the rest is the version that gets rescinded two years later. The same test decides whether bonus work belongs in a grade at all: points that measure something other than the standard move the number without moving the learning it reports.
1. Code every 50 so it says something. A 50 with no explanation tells a student and a parent nothing. Gradebook codes do the work: not mastered, absent, not handed in, did not attempt. One teacher in the Edutopia reporting uses exactly those four so families can see which problem they are looking at. A 50 for a genuine attempt and a 50 for a blank page are different situations wearing the same number.
2. Keep the floor an F. A 50 on a scale where 65 passes is still failing. If the policy is being sold as protecting students from failure, it is being sold wrong. It protects them from a specific arithmetic distortion, which is a smaller and more defensible claim.
3. Attach a real deadline to the real work. The floor should hold a place, not close a case. Publish one window, say what happens at the end of it, and hold the line you published. The deadline question deserves its own policy, and the two rules have to agree with each other or students will find the gap in about a week.
4. Separate the grade from the behavior. If the concern is responsibility, record responsibility somewhere a grade cannot swallow it. Mixing a measure of learning with a measure of compliance produces a number that answers neither question, which is the same problem standards-based grading is built to solve.
5. Name who keeps using it, and watch the pattern by group. Track which students take the floor repeatedly. Three 50s in a semester is a student who needs something other than a grading rule, and the floor is doing its job only if it buys time for somebody to notice. Run the same count by student group, because a floor applied far more often to one group is either catching a real inequity or hiding one, and you cannot tell which without looking.
One thing a grading floor genuinely costs you, and the reason the reason codes in condition one are not optional: a 50 is not a measurement. It is a placeholder entered where no evidence exists. A gradebook with nine real scores and one 50 still tells you what the student can do. A gradebook with four real scores and six 50s has stopped being a record of learning, and no amount of averaging will tell you which standard the student missed. That is the strongest objection to the policy and it has nothing to do with accountability. It is why the incomplete or not-yet version is cleaner on the measurement question, and why a floor without reason codes destroys information a teacher needs.

And one logistical fact that decides whether any of this survives contact with a building: most gradebooks cannot enforce a floor automatically. If the rule depends on every teacher remembering to type 50 instead of 0, the policy will be applied unevenly within the same hallway by November. Check what the software can actually do before the policy is announced, not after.

Five conditions. The floor on its own is none of them.

How do you explain a no zero grading policy to a parent who thinks it is soft?

Lead with the arithmetic and never with the compassion. A parent who hears “we did not want him to feel bad” has every reason to object. A parent who hears “one missing assignment was costing him three perfect scores to recover from, and he is still failing that assignment” is being told something checkable.

Then say the part most schools skip. The 50 is not the grade for the work; it is the grade for the absence of the work, and it is still an F. The assignment is still due. If the policy does not include that second sentence, the parent is right to push, and the way the message is written decides how the conversation goes more than the policy does.

The harder parent to answer is the one whose child does every assignment on time. That parent is not asking about arithmetic; they are asking why the gap between their child and a classmate who turned in nothing just got smaller. The honest answer is that it did, by ten points on one assignment, and that their child’s grade is unchanged while the classmate is still failing that assignment and still owes the work. If the policy has no redo requirement, there is no good answer to give that parent, which is another reason the second half of the rule is not optional.

What does this look like from the student’s side?

Students read a grading floor as information about whether recovery is possible. That is the honest reason it changes behavior when it changes behavior at all. A student at 71 with three assignments left can do the math and see a path; a student who did the same math and found no path has already decided what the rest of the semester is worth. They also read it as information about whether the adults are consistent, and a floor announced in August and quietly ignored in October is worse than no floor at all.

And the students who do all the work have a fairness complaint of their own, which deserves a straight answer rather than a lecture about empathy. They notice when a classmate gets fifty points for a blank page. The answer is that the classmate is still failing that assignment, still owes it, and gets no credit until it arrives — and that the student asking is owed the same consistency everyone else is getting. A policy you cannot defend to a sixteen-year-old who did the work is not ready.

What should a school decide before mandating this?

A district adopting a floor is making three decisions at once, and most adopt the first and skip the other two. The number, what it obligates the student to do next, and what it obligates the school to do next — which is where the staffing and the money live.

Carifio and Carey estimate the school they studied saved roughly $1 million over seven years in avoided course repeats, summer school and credit recovery. Treat that figure carefully: it is one school, it is the authors’ own estimate, and savings assume the students who passed had actually learned enough to move on. But it does mean the cost conversation runs in both directions, which is not how the policy usually gets presented to a board.

Two decisions usually get made by default instead of on purpose. The first is whether teachers keep any discretion. A mandate that strips judgment from every teacher in the building will be worked around, and a rule everyone quietly works around is worse than either option honestly chosen. The second is who chases the redo. The required-work half of the policy is real labor — tracking, reminding, re-collecting, re-grading — and if the answer is “the classroom teacher, on top of everything else,” say so out loud when the policy is announced rather than letting people discover it in week three.

One compliance item to check before adopting, not after: how the floor interacts with transcripts, GPA calculation and anything your state reports. A grading rule that changes course averages changes the number colleges see, and a district that cannot explain the relationship between its floor and its transcripts has created a problem for its own counselors.

Clay’s take

My position starts somewhere slightly different than the research. If a student can fail that badly in my room, the first question is what the planning looked like, and the second is what I was doing for the three weeks it took to get there. A zero that accumulated quietly over a grading period is usually a record of adult inattention as much as student choice.

So the floor is not the interesting part of this policy. The redo requirement is, and a school that adopts the 50 without it has bought the criticism and none of the benefit. Give a teenager a path back and most of them take it; give them arithmetic saying the semester is already over and some of them believe you. And the honest answer to “what does the research say” is that the research has not been done — which teachers deserve to hear instead of a confident number from whichever side asked first.

The redo requirement is easier to honor when a second version of the assessment already exists. For the big one at the end of the semester, Mid-Terms.org publishes 200 free printable midterms with answer keys for grades 6–12, and every course comes as a Form A and a Form B, so the student who takes the floor in December has a different paper waiting when the work comes due.

What to do next

Pull your own gradebook and find one student whose average is held down by a single zero. Run the arithmetic above on that student and see how many perfect scores recovery would take. If the answer is more assignments than the grading period contains, you have found the problem the floor is built for.

Then decide the second half before you decide the number. What does the student owe, by when, and what happens when the work arrives? If you cannot answer those three questions, the floor is not ready to adopt. Next, read the late work policy that has to agree with it and the objections to standards-based grading taken seriously, because every real version of this fight ends up in one of those two places. Everything on this site is free and nothing asks for your email address.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a no zero grading policy?

A no zero grading policy sets a minimum score for any assignment, usually 50 on a 100-point scale, so missing or failed work is entered as that minimum instead of a zero. The grade is still an F and the assignment is still owed. The rule changes only how far a single missing assignment can drag an average down.

Does a no zero grading policy cause grade inflation?

The largest study available says no. Carifio and Carey examined 343,425 sets of grades for 10,958 students across seven years in one urban high school with a 50 floor and reported no evidence of grade inflation or social promotion, with only 0.3 percent of grade sets starting at the minimum and ending in a pass. It is one school, retrospective, and written by advocates.

Why is a zero considered mathematically unfair?

Because the 100-point scale is not evenly spaced. A, B, C and D each cover about ten points while F covers everything from 64 to zero. That makes a zero roughly six letter-grade intervals below a D rather than one, so a single zero can outweigh several strong scores in a way no passing grade ever can.

Is there research proving no zero policies help students?

No. There is no randomized trial of a no zero grading policy. The Fordham Institute’s critique of equitable grading concedes it cites no study measuring the effects of minimum grading itself, and the main study in favor is retrospective records from a single school. Both sides are reasoning from adjacent evidence.

Does strict grading produce better results than a grading floor?

Strict grading standards do have strong evidence behind them, but on a different question. Gershenson found that across 342,098 North Carolina Algebra I students, the strictest-grading quarter of teachers raised end-of-course scores by 16.9 percent of a standard deviation. That study measures how hard teachers grade submitted work, not what they enter for missing work.

What should replace a zero if you do not use a 50?

An incomplete or not-yet code with a required submission date is the cleanest alternative, because it withholds a number rather than inventing one. Some teachers record the true score on the paper and a 50 in the gradebook with a reason code attached. The common requirement in every workable version is that the real work is still owed.

How many 50s should one student be allowed?

Set a count and watch it rather than leaving it open. A student taking the floor three times in a semester needs something a grading rule cannot provide, and the point of the floor is to buy time for an adult to notice. A policy with no counting mechanism cannot tell the difference between a bad week and a pattern.

Sources
- Carifio, J., & Carey, T. (2013). The arguments and data in favor of minimum grading. Mid-Western Educational Researcher, 25(4), 19–30. Seven years of grading data from one large urban high school with a 50 minimum: 343,425 sets of grades, 10,958 students; 0.3 percent of grade sets began at the minimum and ended passing; 925 students (8.4 percent) passed at least one course after a minimum grade; estimated savings of roughly $1 million over seven years. The authors advocate for minimum grading, the design is retrospective with no control condition, and it is a single school. Reports the figures of their own 2012 Educational Researcher study, 41(6), 201–208.
- Gershenson, S. (2020). Great Expectations: The Impact of Rigorous Grading Practices on Student Achievement. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. 342,098 eighth and ninth grade Algebra I students, about 8,000 teachers, North Carolina, 2006–2016. Top grading-standards quartile versus the lowest: +16.9 percent of a standard deviation same-year, +7.3 percent in Geometry, +8.6 percent in Algebra II. Subgroup effects 8.2–10.4 percent, differences not significant. No effect on graduation. The study does not examine no-zero or grade-floor policies; its mention of them is a policy argument in the implications section. Author states the mechanism is unclear.
- Coffey, M., & Tyner, A. (2024). Think Again: Does “equitable” grading benefit students? Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Assembles the grade-inflation evidence (ACT 2023: average GPA 3.4 against composite scores at a post-2010 low; TNTP False Signals; CALDER and Brookings grade-versus-test gaps) and cites Figlio and Lucas (2004), Gershenson (2020) and Babcock (2010) for stricter standards. Concedes it cites no study measuring the effects of minimum grading itself, that quantifying the reforms’ impact is difficult, and that “some grading reforms may benefit students.”
- Minero, E. (2018). Do no-zero policies help or hurt students? Edutopia. Cited as practitioner reporting, not a study. Source of the Leominster Public Schools rescission, the gradebook reason-code practice, and Sarah Duncan’s observation that students read an F as not belonging. Describes the 50-percent floor as implemented in districts including Fairfax County and Philadelphia.
- Minimum grade / grading scale (book excerpt, “Equitable Grading Practices,” p. 84). Corwin. Read as an excerpt; the excerpt does not name its author and ends mid-argument. Sets out the two alternatives — raise the minimum or change the scale — and carries Guskey’s (2004) explanation that secondary teachers keep the zero partly so students feel a consequence. Also cites Reeves (2004).
- Arithmetic in the table and the recovery counts is my own calculation from the four stated scores, not a finding from any source above.
About Clay Shumate

Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.
October 24, 2026

Entry for the missing work	New average	Letter	Perfect scores needed to climb back to an 80
Zero	71.0	C	3
50 floor	81.0	B	0 — already there
Dropped from the average	88.75	B+	0

Formal vs Informal Formative Assessment: What Actually Separates Them

By Clay Shumate · Updated October 24, 2026

Formal formative assessment is planned before the lesson and produces a record you can look at later — an exit ticket, a quiz, an embedded prompt. Informal formative assessment happens in the moment, usually through questioning, and leaves no artifact. Both are formative only if you actually change what you do next.

Key Takeaways

The difference between formal and informal formative assessment is planning and evidence, not rigor: formal checks are designed ahead of time and leave a record, informal checks happen live and do not.
Informal questioning is the most common form of formative assessment in classrooms, which means most teachers are already doing the harder one badly rather than not doing it at all.
Ruiz-Primo and Furtak’s ESRU model — elicit, student responds, recognize, use — is the clearest test of whether an informal check was real. Most classroom questioning stops at the second step.
The famous 0.4 to 0.7 effect size for formative assessment is not well supported. A 2011 meta-analysis found a weighted mean of 0.20 across 42 effect sizes, and a 2012 critique argued even that number is unreliable.
Formal and informal are not a clean binary. WestEd lists informal-versus-formal as just one of fourteen dimensions along which formative assessments vary.

Every district PD session on formative assessment eventually reaches the slide that says “formal vs. informal,” and the slide is almost always wrong. It usually implies formal means serious and informal means casual, which leaves teachers thinking the real work is the exit ticket and the questioning is just talking.

It is the other way around more often than not. The informal version is harder to do well, happens hundreds of times a day, and is the one nobody ever gets coached on. This article explains what the distinction actually is, what the research says about each, and when to use which. If you want the strategies themselves rather than the categories, the full list of formative assessment strategies is the better starting point.

Is formative assessment formal or informal? What separates them

Formal formative assessment is planned in advance, given to everyone at a set point, and produces something you can look at after the bell. Informal formative assessment is unplanned, happens inside instruction — usually as a question — and produces only what you noticed at the time. Both are formative because of what you do with the information, not because of the format.

That last clause is the one people skip. Formative assessment is defined by purpose, not by instrument. Black and Wiliam’s 1998 definition, still the one most researchers use, covers activities that “provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities.” A quiz you collect, grade, and never act on is not formative. A question you ask and genuinely respond to is.

WestEd’s review of the research makes the same point and then complicates it usefully: formal and informal are not two boxes but a spectrum, and the report lists informal-versus-formal as only one of fourteen dimensions along which formative assessments vary — alongside spontaneous versus planned and curriculum-embedded versus stand-alone. Those dimensions overlap but they are not the same axis. A question can be planned in advance and still leave no record. An exit ticket can be invented on the spot.

Comparison table of formal and informal formative assessment across six rows: when it is designed, typical form, whether it leaves a record, who it reaches, how it fails, and which question it answers. — Formal and informal formative assessment compared across six dimensions.

	Formal formative assessment	Informal formative assessment
When it is designed	Before the lesson	In the moment, usually inside a discussion
Typical forms	Exit ticket, embedded written prompt, ungraded quiz, hinge question on a slide, whiteboard check	Questioning, listening in on group work, reading over a shoulder, a follow-up probe
Leaves a record?	Yes — you can sort it, re-read it, bring it to a PLC	No, unless you write something down
Who it reaches	Everyone, at once	Whoever answered, which is rarely everyone
Main failure mode	Collected and never acted on; becomes a grade	Teacher hears the answer, says “good,” and moves on
Cost per use	Planning time up front, review time after	Almost no prep; high cognitive load during the lesson
Best for	Deciding what tomorrow looks like; evidence you can show someone	Deciding what the next five minutes look like
Grade it?	No	Not possible, and that is a feature

Formal and informal formative assessment compared on the dimensions that change what a teacher does.

What counts as informal formative assessment?

Questioning, mostly. WestEd calls informal questioning the most common form of formative assessment there is. It also includes listening to a group argue, reading over a shoulder during work time, and the follow-up probe you ask when an answer sounds memorized.

The useful research here comes from Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo and Erin Furtak, who studied three middle school science teachers working through a physical science unit on buoyancy and built a model called the ESRU cycle. It has four steps: the teacher Elicits a response, the Student responds, the teacher Recognizes what the response actually revealed, and the teacher Uses it to do something different.

That fourth step is where almost all classroom questioning dies. A teacher asks, a student answers, the teacher says “right” and keeps going. That is an E and an S. Nothing was assessed. The ESRU model is valuable precisely because it makes the gap visible: in Ruiz-Primo and Furtak’s study, the teacher who more often completed full cycles had students who performed better on an embedded assessment than the students of the other two teachers.

Be careful how much weight you put on that result. It is three teachers, in middle school science, in one unit, with no control group — a point later raised by Derek Briggs and colleagues when they reviewed how this literature gets synthesized. It is a good model and a small study. Treat the ESRU cycle as a coaching lens, not as proof of an effect size.

The four steps of the ESRU cycle for informal formative assessment: elicit, student responds, recognize what the answer revealed, and use it to do something different. Most classroom questioning stops at the second step. — The ESRU cycle, and the step where most questioning stops.

What counts as formal formative assessment?

Anything written and planned that you designed to show whether the class is ready to move on — and that you do not grade. Exit tickets, embedded written prompts, whiteboard checks, hinge questions, ungraded quizzes. Each sits at a point in the unit where you need a decision, and each is built before the lesson rather than improvised in it.

What makes these formal is not that they are written. It is that you decided in advance what you needed to know and built an instrument to find out. WestEd describes these as embedded prompts, often requiring a written response, placed at key points in instruction to identify next steps. The planning is the point: a question you wrote yesterday is almost always a better question than one you improvise at 10:42.

The failure mode is equally specific. A formal check becomes a small summative test the moment it enters the gradebook, and students respond accordingly — they protect the score instead of showing you the confusion. If you want the evidence to be honest, the check cannot count. That is also the argument running through our piece on what standards-based grading actually fixes.

Is formal formative assessment the same thing as summative assessment?

No, and this is the confusion that wrecks the whole topic. Formal and informal describe how a check is built. Formative and summative describe what the result is for. They are two separate axes, which means a written test can be formal and formative, formal and summative, or — most commonly in real schools — formal, labeled formative, and used summatively. Our guide to the difference between formative and summative assessment works through that second axis in detail.

Run the four combinations and the distinction gets concrete. A planned exit ticket you sort and act on is formal and formative. A unit test that decides a grade is formal and summative. A follow-up question that changes your next sentence is informal and formative. And a teacher mentally marking a student as “one of the weak ones” based on an offhand answer is informal and summative, which is the one nobody names and the one that does the most damage.

That fourth box deserves a sentence of its own. An informal check that quietly hardens into a judgment about a student is not assessment at all; it is a prediction, and teenagers notice being predicted. If an informal check does not change what you do, it should not change what you think about who the student is either.

The practical test for any check, formal or informal: name the decision it feeds. If the only answer is “it shows me where they are,” it is going in a gradebook or a drawer, not into instruction.

The formal-and-summative box still has to be filled at some point, usually at the end of the semester. For that one, the Mid-Terms.org library has 200 free printable midterms with answer keys for grades 6–12 across Social Studies, ELA, Math and Science, which leaves your planning time for the formative checks that actually change instruction.

Is formal or informal formative assessment more effective?

No study answers that cleanly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is extrapolating. The honest position is that the evidence base for formative assessment as a whole is thinner than its reputation, and it has almost never been broken out by formal versus informal.

Start with the number everybody quotes. Black and Wiliam reported in 1998 that “typical effect sizes of the formative assessment experiments were between 0.4 and 0.7,” drawing on 250 sources. That range is on a thousand PD slides.

It did not hold up. Neal Kingston and Brooke Nash reviewed more than 300 K–12 studies in 2011 and found that only 13 reported enough information to calculate an effect size. From 42 independent effect sizes they got a median of 0.25 and a weighted mean of 0.20 — a third of the low end of the famous range. By subject: English language arts 0.32, mathematics 0.17, science 0.09.

And then the correction got corrected. In 2012 Derek Briggs, Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo, Erin Furtak, Lorrie Shepard and Yue Yin argued that the 0.20 figure is not reliable either: the search was not replicable, studies meeting the criteria were excluded while one without a control group was included, and effect sizes calculated with and without pretest data are not comparable. In one study they recalculated, the mean shifted from −0.32 to −0.14 depending on the formula. Their conclusion is the one worth carrying: a different sample of studies could produce an average substantially higher or lower, so considerable uncertainty remains.

What that means for a Tuesday: formative assessment is a reasonable bet with an unreliable price tag. Do not choose between formal and informal on the strength of an effect size, because there is no credible effect size for either one separately.

When should you use formal vs. informal formative assessment?

Match the check to the decision you are about to make. Informal checks tell you what to do in the next five minutes. Formal checks tell you what tomorrow looks like. If you are not about to make either decision, you are collecting data for no one.

Mid-explanation, something feels off. Informal. Stop, ask one student to say the last step back in their own words, then probe the part they skipped. You need an answer in ten seconds, not a record.
Deciding whether to move to the next lesson. Formal. You need everyone, not the four hands that go up. Three questions on the way out is enough.
Group work is running and you cannot tell who is doing the thinking. Informal. Listen without intervening for ninety seconds per group; you learn more than any written check will tell you.
A misconception you have seen every year. Formal, and planned months ago. Write the prompt that exposes it and put it in the unit at the point it usually appears.
You have to explain a reteach decision to a coach, a parent, or a PLC. Formal. “It felt shaky” is not evidence. Sixty-one exit tickets is.

How do you run both in one week with 150 students?

Run informal checks constantly and formal checks twice a week, and read the formal ones in a sort rather than a grade. The whole system should cost you under thirty minutes of out-of-class time per week, or it will not survive October.

Pick one informal habit to improve, not five. The highest-value one is the U in ESRU: after a student answers, do something with it out loud. “So if that’s true, what happens when…” Thirty seconds, no prep, and it is the step the research says separates teachers.
Write two formal checks when you plan the unit, not the night before. Place them at the two points where students have historically gotten lost. Three questions each, maximum.
Sort, do not grade. Three piles: got it, partial, not yet. Count the piles. That takes about eight minutes for 150 papers and it is the only number you need.
Change one thing tomorrow because of the piles. Reteach the partials in a ten-minute opener, or pull the “not yet” group while everyone else starts. If nothing changes, stop running the check.
Tell students what the pile meant. Not a score — the actual gap. A check students cannot see the result of teaches them that checks are for the teacher.

Five steps for running both formal and informal formative assessment in one week in under thirty minutes: improve one informal habit, write two formal checks during unit planning, sort rather than grade, change one thing tomorrow, and tell students what their pile meant. — A week of both, for under thirty minutes of out-of-class time.

Subject-specific versions of step two are worth stealing rather than inventing: there are worked examples for reading, writing and science, and a free printable set if you would rather not build from scratch.

What does good informal formative assessment look like to an observer?

It looks like the teacher changing course. An observer cannot see a formative check directly, because the evidence is a decision rather than a document. What they should watch for is the gap between what the lesson plan said and what the teacher actually did after a student spoke.

Four things worth looking for, whether you are being observed or doing the observing:

Follow-up questions outnumber new questions. A room where every question goes to a different student is a room where nothing is being probed.
Wrong answers get used rather than corrected. “Say more about that” after a wrong answer is the single clearest sign the teacher is assessing rather than quizzing.
The plan visibly bends. Something got cut, repeated, or reordered during the period.
Being wrong is survivable. If the only students answering are the ones who are sure, the informal check is sampling the wrong population and the data is worthless.

That last point is not a soft one. An informal check only works if students will show you a half-formed idea, and they will only do that if the room is safe for it — which is why respect that goes both ways is an assessment issue before it is a culture issue.

What should a school actually invest in?

Coaching on the informal side and time to build the formal side — in that order, and neither of them is a purchase. The most common district response to formative assessment is to buy a platform or mandate a template, and both of those produce compliance rather than instruction.

Three things that cost staffing rather than software:

Someone scripting questioning with teachers. A coach sitting in for twenty minutes and transcribing the question-and-answer sequence is the only feedback that improves informal checks. There is no template for the U in ESRU.
Unit planning time that includes writing the two checks. If the checks are written during planning, they land at the right points and cost nothing in-week. If they are written the night before, they will be generic and they will stop in October.
A rule that formative checks do not enter the gradebook. This is free, it is the single biggest determinant of whether the evidence is honest, and it has to come from leadership because an individual teacher who stops grading checks looks like they are lowering the standard.

One caution on the evidence, since this is where a district asks for it. The strongest study design in this area is Decristan and colleagues’ cluster-randomized trial of embedded formative assessment, and it found that the assessment and general classroom process quality — cognitive activation, supportive climate, classroom management — interacted. The practice did not work on its own; it worked in rooms that were already running well. That sample was elementary science, so a secondary leader is reasoning by analogy. But the implication travels: a formative assessment rollout in a building where classroom management is the real problem is solving the second problem first.

Clay’s take: the informal one is the one nobody coaches

Districts invest in the formal side because it produces artifacts, and artifacts are what you can put in a binder. So teachers get templates, exit ticket banks, and a data meeting. Nobody sits in the back of a room and says, “you asked eleven questions this period and used the answer to two of them.”

That is backwards, and it is backwards for a reason worth naming: the informal version is the one that respects students as thinkers. A written check asks a teenager to produce the right answer. A real follow-up question asks them to explain their reasoning to an adult who is actually listening, and then does something visible with what they said. Teenagers can tell the difference between those two experiences instantly.

The other thing I would say to an administrator: do not mandate a daily exit ticket. You will get 180 pieces of paper a year per teacher and no change in instruction, because the mandate produces the artifact and the artifact is not the thing. Ask instead what got retaught last week and why. If the answer is specific, the assessment is working regardless of what format it took.

What should you do next?

Count your U’s for one period. Teach normally, and afterward mark how many times a student answer actually changed what you said next. Most teachers find the number is one or two, and most are surprised by that. It is the cheapest diagnostic in this whole article and it does not require a template.

Then add exactly one formal check to next week’s plan, sort it into three piles, and change one thing because of it. If you want strategies to fill that slot, go to the main strategies list; if you are assessing a project rather than a lesson, assessment for project-based learning covers the version where there is no unit test at the end.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is formative assessment formal or informal?

It can be either. Formative assessment is defined by purpose, not format: any check whose results you use to change what you teach next. A planned exit ticket or ungraded quiz is formal formative assessment because it is designed in advance and leaves a record. A follow-up question during a discussion is informal formative assessment because it happens live and leaves no artifact.

What are examples of informal formative assessment?

Questioning is the most common example. Others include listening in on a group while it works, reading over a shoulder during work time, and asking a follow-up probe when an answer sounds memorized. They count as formative only if you use what you heard, which is the step most classroom questioning skips.

What is the difference between formal and informal formative assessment?

Formal formative assessment is planned before the lesson, given to the whole class, and leaves a record you can review later – an exit ticket or an embedded written prompt. Informal formative assessment happens live inside instruction, usually through questioning, and leaves no artifact. Both are formative only if the teacher changes something as a result.

Is a quiz a formal or an informal formative assessment?

A quiz is formal, because it is planned in advance and produces a record. Whether it is formative depends on what happens next. If the score goes in the gradebook and nothing is retaught, it functioned as a small summative test. If you sort the results and change tomorrow’s lesson, it was formative, regardless of the name on it.

Which is more effective, formal or informal formative assessment?

No credible study separates them. Formative assessment as a whole has a contested evidence base: the often-quoted 0.4 to 0.7 range from 1998 was revised to a weighted mean of 0.20 in a 2011 meta-analysis, and a 2012 critique argued even 0.20 is unreliable. Choose based on the decision you need to make, not on an effect size.

What is the ESRU cycle?

ESRU stands for elicit, student responds, recognize, use. Ruiz-Primo and Furtak proposed it in 2007 to describe informal formative assessment: the teacher asks, the student answers, the teacher recognizes what the answer revealed, and the teacher uses it. Most classroom questioning stops after the student answers, which means no assessment actually happened.

Should formative assessments be graded?

No. The moment a check counts, students protect the score instead of showing you what they do not understand, and the evidence you get back is worse. Sort the responses into got it, partial and not yet, tell students what their pile meant, and keep the gradebook out of it. The point is a teaching decision, not a number.

How many formal formative assessments should I run per week?

Two is enough for most secondary courses, placed at the points in a unit where students historically get lost. Three questions each. If you are running one every day and never changing instruction because of them, you have added paperwork rather than assessment. The weekly cost should stay under thirty minutes of out-of-class time.

Does informal formative assessment work with a class that will not talk?

Only if you fix the talking first, because informal checks sample whoever answers. In a quiet room the four confident students become your data, which tells you almost nothing about the other twenty-six. Use written formal checks as the backbone until wrong answers are survivable, then shift weight back toward questioning.

Sources

Trumbull, E., & Lash, A. (2013, April). Understanding formative assessment: Insights from learning theory and measurement theory. San Francisco: WestEd. Source of the fourteen dimensions and of the finding that informal questioning is the most common form of formative assessment.
Ruiz-Primo, M. A., & Furtak, E. M. (2007). Exploring teachers’ informal formative assessment practices and students’ understanding in the context of scientific inquiry. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44(1), 57–84. Three middle school science teachers, one physical science unit on buoyancy, no control group. The abstract and study description were read; the full text sits behind a publisher paywall.
Kingston, N., & Nash, B. (2011). Formative assessment: A meta-analysis and a call for research. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 30(4), 28–37. More than 300 K–12 studies reviewed, 13 usable, 42 independent effect sizes; median 0.25, weighted mean 0.20.
Briggs, D. C., Ruiz-Primo, M. A., Furtak, E., Shepard, L., & Yin, Y. (2012, August 20). Meta-analytic methodology and inferences about the efficacy of formative assessment. Pre-print for Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice. The four-point critique of Kingston and Nash used in this article.
Wiliam, D., & Black, P. (1998, October). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 144, 146–148. Source of the “typical effect sizes… between 0.4 and 0.7” claim, drawn from 250 sources.
Decristan, J., Klieme, E., Kunter, M., Hochweber, J., Büttner, G., Fauth, B., Hondrich, A. L., Rieser, S., Hertel, S., & Hardy, I. (2015). Embedded formative assessment and classroom process quality. American Educational Research Journal, 52(6), 1133–1159. A cluster-randomized trial of 28 classes — 17 treatment, 11 control — finding that embedded formative assessment and classroom process quality interacted in promoting learning. The sample was elementary science, not secondary, and the abstract was read rather than the full text; it is cited here for the interaction finding, not for an effect size.

About Clay Shumate

October 20, 2026

Tag: assessment

Formative vs Summative Assessment: The Difference, and How to Use Both in Grades 6–12

Key Takeaways

What is the difference between formative and summative assessment?

What is formative assessment?

What is summative assessment?

Is the difference the assessment itself, or what you do with the result?

Does formative assessment actually raise achievement?

How many formative checks should you run before a summative assessment?

Should formative assessment go in the gradebook?

What to tell students about why it does not count

Where the formative vs summative distinction goes wrong in real schools

Clay’s take: the word is doing almost no work

What should you do next?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between formative and summative assessment?

Is a quiz formative or summative?

Should formative assessment be graded?

What is the ideal ratio of formative to summative assessment?

How effective is formative assessment really?

Are formative and summative the same as informal and formal?

What are examples of formative and summative assessment in middle and high school?

Can a summative assessment be used formatively?

Sources

Should Students Be Allowed to Retake Tests? What the Research Says and How to Write a Fair Policy

Key Takeaways

Should students be allowed to retake tests?

What does the research on retaking tests actually show?

What does the evidence against retakes say?

What should a retake policy decide in writing?

What does a fair retake process look like, step by step?

How much work do retakes add for teachers?

Will students game a retake policy, and is it fair to students who studied?

How do you keep retakes equitable?

So, should students be allowed to retake tests?

Frequently Asked Questions

Should students be allowed to retake tests?

Does allowing retakes make students study less?

Should a retake replace the original score or be averaged?

How many times should a student be allowed to retake a test?

Should the retake be the same test?

How do I explain a retake policy to parents?

What if a student fails the retake too?

Do the same rules apply to students with accommodations?

Sources

Extra Credit Ideas for Grades 6–12: Which Ones Are Defensible and Which Ones Distort the Grade

Key Takeaways

What is extra credit, and why does it cause so many grading arguments?

What does the research say about extra credit?

Which extra credit ideas are defensible?

Which extra credit ideas distort the grade?

What works better than extra credit?

How do you set up extra credit if your school expects it?

How is extra credit different from rewards and incentives?

What should you tell students and parents about extra credit?

Clay’s take: give students a second chance at the same standard, not a bonus on a different one

What to do next

Frequently Asked Questions

Is extra credit fair to students who already have an A?

Should extra credit ever raise a failing grade?

Is a test retake the same thing as extra credit?

How do you keep second chances from burying you in grading?

What if my school or district bans or requires extra credit?

Why shouldn’t students earn extra credit for supplies or events?

Do bonus items follow a student’s testing accommodations?

How can families see how much of a grade came from extra credit?

Sources

No Zero Grading Policy: The Math, the Evidence, and the Part Schools Get Wrong

Key Takeaways

What is a no zero grading policy?

Why does one zero do so much damage on a 100-point scale?

What does the research on minimum grading actually show?

What does the evidence against lenient grading show?

Does a no zero grading policy mean students stop being accountable?

What should a no zero grading policy actually require?

How do you explain a no zero grading policy to a parent who thinks it is soft?

What does this look like from the student’s side?

What should a school decide before mandating this?

Clay’s take

What to do next