For several years now, critics have been blaring klaxons about the questionable quality and increasing prevalence of “credit recovery” courses in America’s high schools. Credit recovery programs (or “online credit recovery”), unlike repeating a class or taking traditional “summer school,” allow students to navigate through computer modules, taking quizzes and assessments within these digital programs to earn the high school credits they initially failed to obtain. Now, a working paper by Carolyn Heinrich and colleagues shines a spotlight on the troubling realities of these programs, particularly through their analysis of an online Algebra 1 credit recovery course.
They approach credit recovery by focusing on the assessments, in particular the assessments for an Algebra I course offered by one of the nation’s largest credit recovery vendors. The team analyzed 1,408 assessment questions, classifying them by their form and also using Bloom’s taxonomy to measure their quality and rigor. Such classifications are not direct measures of question quality, which might be debated by educators and psychometricians, but certainly speak to the value of the assessments. The results are both unsurprising and disheartening: Not only were 83 percent of the questions multiple choice, but over 90 percent did not demand any higher-order thinking such as analysis or evaluation. Only a handful of word problems required students to engage in more complex cognitive tasks.
Since in-person proctoring of these exams is rare, what’s even worse is that 91 percent of the assessment questions could be easily answered with a simple Google search. Many of these questions have been floating around the internet since 2015, with answers readily available on numerous websites. The process for retaking tests previously failed is also alarmingly lenient. Students retaking unit exams, known as “post-tests,” can review all their previous answers along with the correct ones before attempting the exam again, often with the questions in the exact same order. This method maximizes the student’s likelihood of passing the exam without actually understanding the material, further diminishing the credibility of these assessments.
The study points to lax state policies on credit recovery as another area of concern. Only a few states have any form of regulation for these programs. New York stands out as the sole state with comprehensive regulations, including rules for ongoing interaction between students and teachers, ensuring that the process isn’t entirely virtual. Still, requiring significant student-teacher interaction is an exceedingly low bar for quality, especially considering the potential for misuse—and the incentives to raise graduation rates. When the American Enterprise Institute surveyed districts about credit recovery policies in 2019, they found little regulation at the district level, either.
What can be done to address these issues? Heinrich and her colleagues recommend several measures. First, they advocate for better assessments that truly measure student understanding and learning. Second, they suggest mandating in-person proctoring to curb the rampant cheating facilitated by the current online formats.
There’s also a pressing need for state-level auditing of these programs. Randomly selecting students for additional testing could provide insights into the extent of superficial learning and cheating. Since districts are what ultimately hand out the credits, districts themselves ought to implement separate, rigorous assessments that students must pass, ensuring that the credits students receive reflect genuine learning and comprehension.
The story of Jeremy Noonan, one of Heinrich’s coauthors for this study and a whistleblower in the Paulding County School District in Georgia, underscores the systemic nature of these issues. Noonan exposed how his district provided test bank questions with easily searchable answers and tried to raise awareness of the problem with authorities ranging from his own principal and other local administrators to state officials in Georgia and even his district’s accreditor, Cognia, which declined to investigate Noonan’s claims. Eventually, he resigned and went public with these problems, which extend far beyond his suburban Atlanta district.
Although credit recovery programs are sold to districts as a more effective and efficient method of catching students up than traditional course-retakes and summer school, evidence continues to accumulate that the way they are implemented in high schools is rife with misuse, prioritizing increasing graduation rates over increasing student learning. As this new study reveals, these programs need a comprehensive overhaul, with rigorous assessments, in-person proctoring, and robust state regulations to ensure they fulfill their promise of helping students succeed. Without dramatic changes, students would almost certainly be better off recovering credit the old-fashioned way, through normal course-retakes and summer school.
SOURCE: Jennifer Darling-Aduana, Carolyn J. Heinrich, Jeremy Noonan, Jialing Wu, and Kathryn Enriquez, “Failing to Learn from Failure: The Facade of Online Credit Recovery Assessments,” Working Paper (June 2024).
