SHORTCUT

I have been monitoring summer school about every other day for the past few weeks. There's not much teaching involved. 

All of the curriculum is online and the students move along through lessons and tests at their own pace. I have a dashboard that lets me see if they are on pace to finish on time or not and allows me to unlock tests for second and third attempts.

Now and then, a student will ask for help. 

Usually on a test. 

I help anyway, as long as it is one of the smaller "mastery" tests and not a unit test. 

Many students have figured out a shortcut. Instead of truly engaging with the material taught in each section, they go straight to the mastery test and take it, guessing all the way. Although the program does not automatically give all the correct answers at the end of the five question test, it does show the student which answers they got right. The student takes the test again. Some of the same questions may or may not get repeated. 

If a student takes the test enough times and tracks which answers he got correct, eventually he can get an 80% and the program will let him continue on to the next lesson.

The problem is ... he will have learned absolutely nothing along the way.

And eventually there comes the 30 question Unit Test! And it counts for a much bigger portion of the overall grade. 

Sadly, the students are often scoring between 10 and 25% on the Unit Tests. Some will finish the course but won't have a high enough grade to get the credit.

The shortcut turns out to be a dead-end.

As for me, I feel like maybe I have been looking for a shortcut to my next stage of life and career. Maybe I need to slow down and pay attention to the present lessons, knowing that it is going to take some time and there's no way around that.