John McLaughlin

And that's really difficult for them and their families.

100%.

And sometimes we have to remember, they just have a bad day.

We've all had bad days.

You show up to a midterm, something has happened, you didn't get enough sleep, and you just didn't do that well.

find a final exam maybe they've worked through and they should be a little more prepared but things within the middle these formative studies things that you're kind of learning this progressive learning should we be failing that should we give people the chance to see where they need to get better before we start assessing their mastery of something like are they really good enough to do it if i got an engineer building a bridge i just wouldn't be able to build the bridge at the end i don't really care if he failed a calculus test in first year so how do we get there

I think the idea of learning to fail well is using failure to understand where your weaknesses are.

If you're doing any sort of chemistry experiment, you go, I'm really not good at mixing with reagents or using the pipette or any of the fancy equipment.

And you do your experiment and you don't do it well.

Well, that's great.

Now you know you didn't do it well.

And that's fine.

But should we allow students to try again?

Say, okay, you've learned what you're not good at.

How can we get some mastery of that?

So next time you're better.

So how do we help them understand what they're failing and get better at it as opposed to saying, well, you failed that.

Now let's move on to the next thing.

It is uniquely bad now simply because we have online learning.

We have all of these different things where now we're assessing people almost entirely on grades.