Recent years have seen a move to eliminate homework and relax grading standards, and struggles by teachers and students to do their work during the pandemic have accelerated this trend. Some educators and commentators, however, fret that these new practices amount to lowering standards. Assigning students to “recover” unearned credits through online programs has also been criticized for reducing academic rigor, and the scandals associated with credit recovery have reinforced the idea that academic standards ought not be entrusted to the programs themselves. Although previous research has examined the prevalence of credit recovery, a new study from the American Journal of Education provides compelling evidence that online credit recovery programs have been on the rise and were even pre-pandemic.
Using data from North Carolina covering all high school students from the 2012–13 through 2016–17 academic years, the study examines enrollment patterns after students fail a required course. In North Carolina schools, as is becoming more common around the country, such students often have options of retaking a course through a traditional face-to-face class and may also have the option to take an online credit recovery course.
The first question the study addresses is about what happens when a student fails a course. It finds that, 38 percent of the time, a failed class is simply never repeated; 38 percent of the time, it’s retaken face-to-face; 19 percent of failures were remediated with online credit recovery exclusively; and 5 percent of the time, the student took a combination of both face-to-face and online credit recovery. In other words, retaking a course face to face remains more common than online credit recovery, at least in the period before the pandemic.
There is strong evidence that schools have been shifting towards online credit recovery and away from in-person course retakes. The study finds, for example, that the share of schools where online credit recovery was more common than in-person class retakes nearly doubled during the study period, from 16 percent in 2013 to 30 percent in 2016. (The end of the study period was around the time that journalists first started taking note of the trend towards online credit recovery.)
The study also investigates how different types of schools may be using credit recovery differently. For example, rural schools and large schools are slightly more likely to put kids into credit recovery. More alarmingly, when schools are broken out by academic characteristics and attendance, substantial differences emerge. Schools with high levels of absenteeism, schools where graduation rates and test scores had been low in the past, and alternative schools are the ones most likely to put kids in online credit recovery when they fail a class.
Interestingly, social studies classes are more commonly reassigned via online credit recovery than math or science courses.
The evidence the study provides about the rigor of credit recovery programs is less definitive but still worth considering. For example, the study finds that students are more likely to pass credit recovery courses than face-to-face courses for the same subject, which may imply that credit recovery is less academically challenging. Since some administrators told the author they were more likely to assign students to credit recovery when they had just barely failed a course or failed because of absences, differences in academic rigor may not be the only thing driving differences in completion. In any case, students who take credit recovery are 12 percentage points more likely to actually receive credit than those who take face-to-face courses.
Finally, the study finds that schools with higher credit recovery enrollment have higher graduation rates but lower test scores. Diplomatically, the study speculates that “schools could be making a purposeful choice to focus on high school graduation rates over test scores.” Yet even if test scores aren’t the only measure of academic success, given the incentives at play and the accumulating cases of misuse of these programs, there are obvious reasons to question schools implementing such a strategy.
SOURCE: Samantha Viano, A Choice between Second Chances: An Analysis of How Students Address Course Failure, American Journal of Education (2021).
