When is a diagnostic retest needed?
In cases where students have rushed through the diagnostic, have not been paying attention, or have simply made some small mistakes, the system will underdiagnose the student's ability and assign them work that is far too easy for them.
When this happens, a Diagnostic Retest can be run to correct these false negatives.Â
 When shouldn't I do a diagnostic retest?
Retests take a long time, and are boring. It's best if they can be avoided.Â
Students who have already completed a retest should have corrected any diagnostic issues in their first retest. So, the fact that you're getting the alert again says that there has been an issue somewhere in the process:
The student may not have completed the retest properly. The retest can be quite long, so students may end up skipping through questions they do know how to answer, causing them to keep getting easy work after the retest is done.
The student may be getting many Entrance Tickets correct, very consistently, to the point where they rarely find a module they don't know how to do.
In both of these cases, it's important to talk with the student before giving out another retest, as it may be a pointless exercise.
Rather than running another retest, you could instead ask the student to simply add any modules they think are easy to their next test. If the work is genuinely easy, they'll master it and be able to move on. If they don't master it, then that's an opportunity to have a chat about the importance of completing the module properly.
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What questions does a diagnostic retest cover?
What the retest does is re-test a student on all the content they previously didn't show mastery for, though it does it in a very clever way. Using a very optimised algorithm, we can work out what students know and what they don't know much more quickly than simply re-asking all the questions they previously answered incorrectly.
How to retest a diagnostic
To retest a diagnostic, go to the 'Diagnostics' page for that class, and then find the code next to that student's name in the 'Diagnostic Retest' column.
