Why can't we reset the unit tests/quizzes after messing up? I've been at this for hours and cannot get 100% because it makes me complete the test instead of just being able to start over. How are people not complaining about this more? half the time is spent just typing fake answers to skip through so i can start over. So frustrating. Why haven't they fixed this?
My autistic son is really struggling with this exact issue. We are at the point where if I can't find a solution we will give up on Khan Academy. This is causing him too much distress and actually hindering his learning.
Please, can someone within Khan Academy change the settings for a student so we can move on to the next section?
We've been using Khan Academy for about 5 years, I really don't want to have to change my autistic son's routine, other than this he does like Khan Academy.
Another solution would be to break the test up to sections to no more than 5 questions, get each block right 100% and then you don't have to do it again.
Please???
Khan Academy has obviously lost its audience completely. In my opinion, rational people will always eventually give up on this app (and this organization) hoping for a better experience. I've spent more time now watching and contributing to these comments to get this fixed than I have on the actual app. I'm wondering if they mistake users logging-in to comment on this one issue as an indication they are actually using the app to learn? I mean it's not much of a stretch given they're making the same mistake assuming forcing users to complete an entire exam with fake answers is actually educational.
Yeah, this is really annoying and give nothing to teaching process. I try to take unit test from 34 questions. One simple typo and I need to redo more than 34 questions again. How does this helping me to learn math?
Such method can train my attention, but maybe it will be better in other part of site for whose who want to train their attention and perfectionism?
Kharlanov Sergey , Hi
I had been told that putting in face answers to get to the end of the test would reduce the students rating, and might mean they had to go back to practice stage before they could attempt the unit test again.
Is this not correct?
Thanks
Lynn
mumtoross, Hi
No, you can take a Unit test anytime, even without practice stage. But in this case you will need to take Unit test more than one time to master a Unit.
Hi
Can we have an achievement for stubborness? After failing integrals applications like 11 times, with 95%, sometimes in the first question due to some idiotic distraction, it's highly demotivating to not be able to reset the test, though i can completely understand and actually support *not* being able to reset the test. From a purely pedagogical perspective, it forced me to pay more attention and plug some minor holes in my knowledge.
Still... with 95% some 11 times, it would be great to have some motivation.
Make it the "stubborn as a mule" achievement, if you have 5 unit tests in a row with scores above 90%, or 10 tests. Anything.... Keep us, the incredibly stubborn, engaged.
Thank you.
"We want to encourage all learners to see that getting problems wrong or not getting 100% on the first try is one of the most important parts of learning--even if that error was a simple calculation mistake, it teaches us to be more diligent."
Or a simple keyboard error, clearly. I do appreciate that if I forget to fill in a box in the practice, I don't get penalized anymore, but that is hardly a significant burden, when the practice is only 4 to 8 problems. I am looking at a 31 problem test, where my keyboard failed to register a key stroke on the second problem, and now I have to either answer 60 problems correctly (the remaining 29 and then 31 for the next run of the test) or just click through missing 29 problems and then doing the review for all of those topics, and then doing 31 problems correctly. I mean, at least have an option for quitting and automatically missing the remaining problems. That by itself would save significant time, and people are already doing that manually! That is time wasted that could be spent learning, if the system was designed more appropriately for learning rather than pedagogical dogmas of a largely failed education system.
If you are going to punish people for keyboard errors, might I suggest removing all speed based achievements, so we are not strongly motivated to get through questions as fast as possible.
This from a 38 year old, with a 3.89 college GPA for a Bachelor's in Computer Science (which included Multivariable Caclulus, which I aced) and a similar GPA almost finished with grad school, frustrated working through the "Multiplication and division" topic just to get the 100%. I am not making calculation mistakes, and I can do most of the math completely in my head, correctly every time. Unfortunately my new wireless keyboard is a bit finicky now and then, and while I can easily make up for it where speed is not an issue, having speed play a significant role in rewards has turned your tests into a nightmare. I would like to use Khan Academy to brush up on my math skills, but my first goal is to breeze through everything I am skilled at, to find where I need more work. If 4th grade math is going to be a problem due to poor design though, I am not sure I have the time to bother.
At least on a paper test, if I miss a 0 on an answer, I can correct it before turning the test in. Grading each problem in real time, without any ability to double check, with time constraints on top of that though? That's a terrible way of testing, if you don't have some easy way of starting over. Maybe your team needs to focus more on accessibility and providing an enjoyable learning experience and a bit less on pedagogical dogma.
If I recall, one of Sal's fundamental principles is that failure is good, because it teaches the brain better than success (a fact proven by many studies). Punishing students for failure goes directly against this principle. Yes, I understand that the current system theoretically teaches diligence, but is the point of this to teach diligence or math (or whatever other subject)? I write a blog on education reform, and one of the pedagogical dogmas I hate the most is the idea that education should teach diligence, work ethic, and anything that is not the topic at hand. If you want to teach students diligence, please make a Khan Academy course for teaching diligence, and get it out of the way of learning other subjects! Likewise, if you want to teach work ethic, make a separate class for it, don't burden other subjects with it. The point of education isn't to learn diligence or work ethic, and it doesn't take much to see that despite how hard our education system tries to teach these, attempting to do so has been an abject failure. All busy work and punishment of failure does is make people hate education and fear failure to the point of not even trying.
I am a college professor, and I have home schooled my children. I have taught a number of college computer science courses, and I find students learn the best, when you remove all unnecessary burdens to learning. My most successful courses have been the ones that don't grade students for anything except what the course is teaching. I've had students turn in buggy programs, but so long as the bugs don't impair my ability to grade and do not display a lack of understanding of the subject of the course, I don't mark students down for them. They know their programs are buggy. I don't need to punish them for it, and doing so won't improve their learning of the topics I am teaching (and indeed, motivating students to focus on things the course is not teaching tends to impair learning). And I have consistently found that if I give students ownership of their work (ie, let them choose their projects, so they can pick applications they have a connection with and interest in), they will fix any ungraded problems later, on their own time. (And then they come tell me about it, and I get to express my delight that they care about the quality of their work that much, reinforcing that behavior.)
Please, drop the dogmas of traditional education and focus on the intent of Khan Academy. Teaching diligence, work ethic, or whatever other unrelated thing should not be part of a math learning program (or any other topic). Students will naturally gain as much diligence as is required just working through the courses.
In addition, allowing students to restart tests will allow them to focus more heavily on the problems they need to work on. Long ago, I started playing Super Mario World on an SNES emulator that allowed me to quickly save and reload the game at any point. What I found is that I rapidly improved in skill in the places I lacked, because I could practice a difficult part hundreds of times in quick succession, saving before and then reloading as soon as my failure was apparent, because I wasn't burdened with the parts I was already skilled at. My skill at this game is still incredibly high, over 20 years later, despite now playing on systems which do not allow me save and reload anywhere I want. Letting students restart tests will allow them to spend more time on what they are struggling with, because they will waste less time working through problems they are already very skilled at. Had your team looked past their pedagogical dogma of trying to teach diligence in a math course, perhaps they would have seen that the best way to improve at a skill one is struggling with is to have very fast turnaround time in evaluation, and you can't have that, when you have 31 problems in a test that you have to complete before you can retake it. Being able to restart will actually improve student learning. Being concerned about teaching diligence in a course that is not specifically about teaching diligence will make your team blind to critical elements of a good system of learning. It's time to get back on track with the original goal of Khan Academy, but to do that, you need to purge the pedagogical dogmas of modern systems of education, by eliminating all burdens from students that are not contributing significantly to learning the subjects you are trying to teach.
On a side note, in my own teaching, I chose to deliberately ignore the common pedagogy and design my courses based on natural learning and evaluation methods. My first course was still about 50% common pedagogy, because I had no practice in course design at the time, so I found myself falling back on my experiences as a student. This was a mistake, and as I was able to purge my course of the common pedagogy over my first few semesters of teaching, it improved dramatically. The most recent course I have designed got a minimum grade of A- in its first semester, and every single student went far beyond the requirements of the course. Further, this course covers topics normally reserved for graduate students, and my students were mostly juniors and seniors with a few sophomores. It is almost certainly the most difficult topic I have taught, but because I eliminated all busy work and pedagogical hurdles common in most classrooms, my students were able to focus exclusively on the subject I was teaching, and they all learned it extremely well. Throwing out the pedagogy and focusing on the end goal has made my courses incredibly successful at educating students in the topics they are taking my courses to learn.
In my personal opinion, pedagogy in general is more dogma than anything else. Teaching needs to be flexible, not bound to a specific methodology, practice, or heaven forbid ideology. I understand this is difficult in an online system for mostly independent learning, but that makes giving students maximum flexibility wherever possible that much more important. The less flexible a system is, the fewer people it is effective for. A system that is bound to a particular pedagogy is a system that can only effectively serve a fraction of the population (hence the poor performance of many education systems around the world). A pedagogy designed to encourage diligence will instead exclude those who have difficulty being diligent, reducing the overall effectiveness of the system. If the goal of Khan Academy is still to bring a world class education to everyone who needs or wants it, it should not exclude anyone, and it should definitely not be built around a pedagogy that attempts to control people's behavior, at the cost its effectiveness in educating them.
1 747 000 points. I am not a kid but a grown man who learn a lot. Great platform, I did some donations.
But this problem is really bad and annoying. And it teach nothing. 34 questions in a row, one typo - do again all the topics that you know by heart.
This is really wrong. And your reaction is very disappointing. A lot of adults write to you more than one year that this is a problem and your answer is just: this is not bug it is a feature and it is useful for you. Really?
This is so sad when people of software project starts thinking that they are gods who know better than some pitiful users (
Lol! Unfortunately, I had a lot to say...
My multiplication skills are actually extremely good. What I am trying to do is find my limits, so I know where I need to start. Yeah, I could have started with college level math, but I just want to make sure there is nothing I am missing, so I am starting at the bottom and working up. That's why it is so frustrating though. One mistype, or my keyboard misses a character, and I have to start over, even though what I tried to type was correct.
EDIT: And by "start over" I mean go though all of the problems on the current test, knowing it's pointless, and then do the whole thing again.
Ah, so you take the position that because someone else had to do it the hard way, everyone should have to do it the hard way, despite the fact that modern technology was designed explicitly to solve that problem. This isn't just a bad position that leads to less effective learning, it is straight up unethical. By this reasoning, we should have just let the Luddites destroy the autolooms, the printing presses, and every other labor saving technology, because it would be unfair to allow future generations to get the same results with less work than past generations. Personally, I am opposed to anything that makes learning harder than it has to be. I don't feel right about giving poor people a lower quality education, because they can't handle the work, when we could be giving them a much better education and thus much better lives, by using modern technology to its full potential. (And no, this doesn't have to cost a lot more than we currently spend. Cheap computers are easy to get now days. Well designed learning systems can reduce the workload of teachers. So lay off a few teachers, buy every student a Raspberry Pi with some of the savings. Get a bunch cheap HDMI screens with the rest. Now every student in the school can use Khan Academy for math. And aside from this serious user interface failure with tests, KA can do a better job of teaching math than a significant portion of teachers in the first place.)
Look, let's say they add an option to reset. That does not infringe on your freedom to do it the hard way. Not having that option, however, does cause problems for others. (Also, I just had my spacebar miss spaces three time just while writing this. I am not blaming that on Khan Academy, but I darn well can blame them that a normally trivial tech failure on my end costs me significant amounts of time due to a poorly designed UI.)
As far as copying goes, is it really their business to try to prevent me from cheating on their free platform, that I am using entirely of my own free will, to get specific benefits? Sure, give teachers options to disallow resets for their own students who are being required to use the platform against their will, giving them plenty of motivation to be dishonest on evaluations. Khan Academy doesn't know how I learn best though, so if I am using it because I want to, it should be my right to be able to use it the most efficient way for me.
And the fact is, in real life, you typically can go back. Even in real life tests, you can review your answers for mistakes before turning the test in. In fact, good teachers generally recommend going through the test answering everything and then using any remaining time to take a fresh look at your answers, because that time delay makes you more likely to notice mistakes you missed when you first did the problem.
Also, show me one written test where a pencil failure has resulted in a wrong answer.
Anyhow, Khan Academy's own representative said the intent of this poor design was to teach students diligence, and like I have already said, teaching diligence in a math course is inappropriate and interferes with effective learning. You want to teach diligence, offer a course on diligence. How is it that we have all of this new tech with the potential to make learning significantly easier and more effective, but instead of doing that, we are constantly coming up with justifications for keeping old limitations that we only had in the first place because it was the only option?
My primary problem with this though, is that it makes Khan Academy less accessible, punishes failure, and hinders learning, all of which go against the core principles Khan Academy claims to have.
And no, "You should just pay attention..." isn't a valid argument. If any industry adopted that principle, we would still have lead paint on children's toys (because parents should pay attention), death trap cars with no air bags and frames and bodies that don't distribute force to reduce fatality (because drivers just shouldn't get in accidents), roads full of uninsured drivers (against, instead of laws requiring insurance, drivers just shouldn't get in accidents), and all sorts of other incredibly dangerous situations. Yes, students should (another spacebar failure) pay attention and learn, but how can the be expected to do that, when they are forced to spend the entire 24-30 minutes on the test, when they discover they need to work on one thing two problems in? There goes half an hour that could be spent fixing their learning gap, but instead they are stuck answering all of the problems they don't need work on. That's not better learning. That's a lame waste of time that not only reduces time spent on real learning but also frustrates students with unnecessary punishment, making them hate learning, which is one of the biggest problems with education in the first place.
Also, of course you can still copy someone else's answer. Not having a reset option doesn't prevent a student from rubbernecking on the guy sitting one seat over and copying the answer when the same question comes up. And KA tests don't use the same questions for every test anyway. Also, you can skip questions and come back to them later. So yeah, copying isn't even relevant to being able to reset the entire test.
In my personal opinion, students should be required to get 100% on subjects as critical as math, to pass the test. Instead of awarding partial credit, the test should automatically reset the first time a problem is missed and encourage (but not force, because technology failures do happen) the student to go back and practice that topic again before retaking the test. The fact that modern technology can provide instant feedback has removed all excuses for passing students who have a poor understanding of critical topics like math.
I have stopped focusing on the completion indicators of different learning sites. For Khan Academy, I just watch the videos, then do the small Quiz tests, watch the next few videos and later do the Unit tests. But I don't try to achieve 100%, just a good-enough rating. It's important to recognize that if you only mistyped something, corrected it and managed to solve the question, it means you probably still learned the content properly.
And the new Mastery Challenge will pop up from time to time and offer your to bring skills you already learned to the 'Mastered' level!
Since I stopped focusing on the percentages and just make sure I understand the topic themselves properly, it causes me a lot less stress. I can only recommend to not focus to much on the grading and concentrate on how you would judge your progress yourself! :)
Ok, so I mentioned just a moment ago that I have several blogs. One is a blog on education reform. (I have spent plenty of time studying education in various contexts, and I mentioned before that I have home schooled my children and I teach college computer science courses.) I just finished two articles on the topic of this thread, because I think it is important enough that it needs more publicity than this thread is ever likely to get. If anyone is interested:
https://ereform.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-scathing-review-of-khan-academy.html
https://ereform.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-solution-to-khan-academy.html
That first one really isn't as scathing as I expected it to be when I started writing it. I really hope someone from Khan Academy who has an open mind and cares more about doing a good job than following a particular pedagogical dogma reads that second one. I think there is a huge opportunity for Khan Academy to not only fix this problem but to dramatically improve their system in the process.
Technically pedagogy just means a particular model for teaching. In modern education though, this is taken to an extreme, where a pedagogy is viewed as a whole, strict teaching ideology. For many teachers, their pedagogy becomes something of a religion (which is essentially what a dogma is). What irks me is when a teacher or teaching establishment adopts a pedagogy and then religiously sticks to it, even when there is evidence that it just does not work or that there is something better.
I don't expect you to look into these too deeply, but two popular pedagogies that do this really badly are Montessori and Waldorf schools. Montessori pretends to be evidence based, and maybe it even was at one time, but it has a lot of things that the founder just decided were good for learning and made part of her pedagogy, without bothering to test. The result is that Montessori works really well for some kids but not very well for others. Waldorf pedagogy does not pretend to be evidence based. It tries to focus on the whole learning mindset and lifelong learning stuff, which, like Montessori, works really well for some students but poorly for others. (Waldorf pedagogy also has some really strange pseudo-religious elements...) The result for both of these is that you have pedagogies that people just invented without any research or evidence. Montessori did have a bit more experience and observation behind it, but that actually didn't make it better. Both pedagogies work way better than U.S. public school pedagogies, for maybe 50% of students, but they work a lot worse for everyone else. The problem with pedagogies though is that they are generally very rigid. Montessori fails badly for a significant number of students, because is has no room to adapt and improve. It is designed to work really well for for a narrow range of students but no one else, and when presented with students that don't learn well within the Montessori pedagogy, it fails. The same is true of Waldorf. Because neither of these are mainstream and are mostly limited to private schools, their success numbers are bloated. Attentive parents who notice their children are doing poorly in public school may decide to try a Montessori or Waldorf school. If it doesn't work out, they try something else. The result is that these schools appear to have a very high success rate, because students who can't learn well within those pedagogies get pulled out, only leaving those who the methods work well for.
The danger with adopting a particular pedagogy for Khan Academy is that it will do the same thing, narrowing the number of people that it will even work for. The best learning system isn't the learning system that some expert thinks will work best, and it isn't even the learning system that fits today's evidence. It is the learning system that is flexible enough to adapt to anyone that is not bound to a rigid pedagogy that prevents it from integrating new information, discoveries, and evidence. Waldorf is 101 years old this year, and it has not integrated any new knowledge on learning discovered in the last hundred years. Montessori is 123 years old this year, and it has similarly not integrated any new knowledge in over 100 years. They are both based on hundreds of years of educational theory, but they are based on outdated theory from the minds of educators not evidence based knowledge and understanding from actual research, experimentation, and study. And that's the direction Khan Academy is going. If Khan Academy wants to make a world class education available to everyone for free, it must drop pedagogy and work on making its platform as flexible and as evidence based as possible, because what works as a world class education for one person may not work at all for another.
And this is advice I have integrated into my own teaching. I have no pedagogy. I adhere to a proficiency based grading approach, because it is the most honest way to grade. Basically, my courses have a list of skills students need to learn to be proficient in the subject, from an employment perspective. For most of the courses, I check off skills as students demonstrate proficiency. I don't do A, B, C, D... grades on assignments. You either demonstrated the proficiency or you didn't. If you didn't, you can try again, but I will only guarantee I will have time to check your first submission. If I have time, and I generally do, I will check resubmissions and check proficiencies they demonstrate. I have to give letter grades for courses, because the university requires it, but assignments are basically all pass/fail. There is one course where proficiencies are divided into letter grades, and to get a particular letter grade for the course, you have to demonstrate all proficiencies through that letter category. This is because at each grade level, an employer will expect certain specific proficiencies. Note that this is Computer Science, where employers actually do look at transcripts and grades on specific courses. This isn't pedagogy though. It is grading technique, not teaching methodology, but it does help maintain enough flexibility to accommodate most students learning needs. (The exception is, there isn't much that can help general disinterest and laziness. Ironically, the course I see most of that in is Video Game Design, so it isn't that the course isn't motivating, and it is an elective, so students only take it if they choose to.) For teaching, I use what has been proven both by studies and by my own experience, and I revise and adjust my courses every semester based on new knowledge I have gained and on how the courses performed the previous semester. They are thus constantly evolving and adapting. I have even made changes during semesters, though I try to keep them minor so that I am not changing expectations on students in the middle of the course. I will never consider my courses to be perfect, because there will always be new discoveries and there will always be students that the current design does not work as well for. So my policy is to avoid pedagogy entirely, so I can keep my teaching as dynamic and flexible as my students need it to be to be successful, and honestly, I find this works incredibly well. It's certainly more work for me, but it is worth it.
Yeah, I didn't get into that (for the sake of space), but yes, it is true. Missing a question already comes with plenty of natural punishment that really cannot be avoided if you are trying to get a perfect score. Making the student complete the already failed effort just adds insult to injury, and yeah, it does discourage effort and lead to disengagement.
That part about spending more time on what you already know is critical. Making the student continue answering questions he or she is already skilled at is wasting time that could be spent improving skills the student is weak on. That's just not a good learning model. That's why I suggested a better solution would be to instantly end (optionally, perhaps) the test on a failed question and immediately encourage the student to work on the weak skill. The student may go through the test a few times before getting a perfect score, but each time a problem is missed, the student will (hopefully) spend some time practicing it, until there are no weak points left. Not only is this more efficient by avoiding doing extra problems unnecessarily, it can also help students achieve mastery more dynamically and in less time by focusing naturally on the things the student needs to work on.
Pedagogy is arrogance. It is founded on the idea that you understand learning sufficiently that you can come up with a system that works perfectly for everyone. This is impossible, because there is no system that even works well for everyone, let alone perfectly.
I happen to also find the inability to restart a unit test over from the beginning. I am struggling right now because I started a unit test long before I actually learned the material bit by bit. It was the fastest way to get points at first. I am stuck with a bunch of wrong questions in a unit test right now but don't want to finish because I will lose a lot of points.
Hey @..., I don't mean any personal shade but I've followed this thread, meaning I get emails for every new post and I've been reading the thread for years now with some interest and lately I feel like your posts have kinda removed the purpose of this thread: To voice users opinion on the theoretical Reset Unit Test feature. I didn't want to call you out specifically but you were the person who was the most active, and also the person who was the most diverted from the original topic.
I just wanted to say that, I'd appreciate if we all kept this thread as a formal thread to get the KA staff to listen to us, but not rather as a chatbox or a random sub-reddit thread. I personally feel like comments such as "heh, we got some more peeps in here" and "was my posts comical? :3 I sure do like making jokes and saying funny things. Riiiiiight? Heh, Just wondering. I dont really mind if they are or not. -w-" Are unnecessary in the big scheme of this thread and makes it less likely for the KA staff to respond to us in a timely and professional manner.
I have created a new thread to discuss Khan Academy's "pedagogical perspective". I almost expect them to delete it right away, because people don't like their personal beliefs to be questioned, and I have seen plenty of other forum owners delete threads that criticize their personal beliefs. We will see how this goes. Following is a link. I would like to highly encourage anyone concerned about Khan Academy's lack of response to this and other issues to contribute. I don't think a siloed pedagogical perspective is appropriate for a non-profit funded through donations from the general public. If Khan Academy's pedagogical perspective is so important that it is worth refusing to implement a widely requested feature, then we as users deserve to know what that pedagogical perspective is. And as users, educators, and in some cases donors, we deserve to have a say in that pedagogical perspective!
I wanted to weigh in a bit here based on my experience. While I understand the pedagogical impetus to not allow resets on assessments, I would like to note that incorrect answers on incomplete unit tests never clear even if the learner does not access the test for weeks or months. Would Khan Academy consider automatically resetting a unit test when it has not been completed in weeks or months? That would recognize that the learner is now at a different place than they were previously, and would fit within the intended pedagogy. I have a learner I'm working with who started a unit test 2 months ago, but who struggles to complete it because they don't want to lock in the errors they made.
Resetting incomplete assessments when it's been some number of weeks since they were last attempted seems like a reasonable solution.
It's not a perfect solution, but it would be a major step in the right direction.
I could see them arguing that this will just encourage people to quit for a while whenever they miss a question to let the test reset. This is probably true, but right now people are quitting forever, because they know it will never reset.
But yes, this seems like a reasonable step to me. Hopefully they eventually catch on that enforcing their personal beliefs about learning on us is just bad business, especially for a non-profit trying to improve education.
I briefly considered not making a donation when the decision was made to not put in the option to reset the unit tests. But I have gotten so much out of Khan Academy as a daily user for almost three years that I felt I owed them something. And I wanted that 2019 contributor badge!
This is really fantastic news. I've been waiting for this for years now. I've not been able to even open Khan even though I was really enjoying going through all the levels. It just became too frustrating without being able to reset when some glitch happened on a geometry question or something similar. I can't wait to get back in and continue my re-learning :-) So happy you finally listened to all the rational people making very clear cases for why not having this function is a total deal-breaker for some.
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