I recently threw a whole stack of vocabulary quizzes in the trash. I rarely do that, but this time, I felt it was the right thing to do. Here's why.
1. The test (not my creation-- it was part of the curriculum) was ridiculously hard -- much harder than all the other fifteen quizzes (which I didn't throw in the trash) from that curriculum we've taken this year. The main lesson content that we had worked so hard on was barely on the quiz.
2. My students knew the content, and they knew it well. Their grades on this test were not representative of what they knew, and I realized that.
3. I didn't feel it was fair to them to record those grades.
So, I threw the whole stack in the trash. But, they didn't get off that easily.
I made another test which covered the main lesson content. A few parts were similar, and some of the difficult stuff was still on there, but it was a much more fair test which gave them an opportunity to prove to me what they really had learned.
When I gave my students another chance at a more fair test, they were ecstatic. They actually cheered. (They are a great bunch of humans.) And when they got their grades back, they were much happier.
When I recorded their grades, I was ecstatic. The grades were much better, as I knew they probably would be. This test was a much more fair representation of what they knew.
There is one additional important element in all of this.
It would have been really easy for me to just record those grades, or to curve them. (I do not like doing that either.) But I wanted to do what was right and treat my students fairly. They knew I wanted to do what was right and fair for them, and that builds trust. That's a good thing to do.