Give students tests back to learn from mistakes

I honestly can't remember the last time I took any kind of test that wasn't published in a women's magazine.

Way, way, way back when I took tests regularly, I don't remember minding them much. They were an accepted part of life as a student. But now that I haven't taken one in what seems like forever, the thought is a little daunting. Perhaps because, way back when, I was pretty good at taking tests and prefer to believe that memory and not, ahem, test it.

But when I read about the Indian Prairie Unit District 204 fifth-graders who might have to retake a standardized test when the tests had been lost (luckily now they have been found), my heart went out to them. A bit silly considering they're just standardized tests, which were generally the least stressful, but it was a wake-up call to my current state of test annoyance.

How odd is it that when I took tests myself, they didn't much bother me, but now that most -- OK, all -- of the test-taking around me is undergone by my offspring, the topic gives me the shudders?

When did that start? Perhaps after the second child's battery of ACT tests? Perhaps after hearing about off-the-wall tests over the years, the capping of which was a recent college-level test in which the professor decreed that if a student didn't get all four questions completely right on a final exam, he would fail the entire semester? That could've done it.

Perhaps my test-aversion is just another symptom of what I've begun to recognize as parent-of-a-student weariness that apparently sets in as your third child navigates high school. Or maybe it's just when your last child, no matter how many you have, goes through. Or maybe it's just me.

I can't remember any of the kids having any particular test anxieties, so it's not that they freak out. It's just that this general sense of test-uselessness and/or unfairness has overcome me.

I suspect it is strongly related to the trend, which I frankly can't stand, of tests now being taken and never seen again. At least from what I've seen, tests now are apparently so difficult to devise that their existence must be hidden from the world so as to be reused by teachers year after year.

The upshot is that kids often don't actually get their tests back -- they receive just a score. Or, they do get to see the test, but just for a short time during class, then they hand it back in to the teacher, never having much -- if any -- time to consider what they did wrong.

I honestly can't count how often I've asked a child "well, which did you get wrong?" and they've answered, "I don't remember."

I thought we were supposed to learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. I remember using old tests to study from for finals, concentrating most on the questions I'd gotten wrong. Today, those questions might as well not exist for our kids because they can't get their hands on them.

A teacher recently told me that for nearly all students, finals will only bring their semester score down, not up. Perhaps there is a correlation? I remember finals being a more positive experience than that.

Sure, giving back tests might mean there are old tests circulating out there. In college, my sorority had an entire file cabinet of old tests that we were encouraged to use as study materials. They were useful, but it sure didn't mean that everyone who used them got 100 percent on future tests. However, I'd bet the people who donated those tests to the files did better on their finals because they had their own tests to look at and study.

I'm a big supporter of teachers in general, but I think this trend is the wrong answer. As a parent who has seen and heard dozens of studying sessions and hundreds of flashcard creations only to hear later, "I have no idea what I did wrong on that question," it sure seems wrong.

If ACT can -- and does -- give back tests for students to study their miscalculations, why can't our teachers? Isn't 100 percent of the point of the whole studying experience to learn something?