The Psychology of Resit Exams:how the Opportunity to Resit Influences Study-Time Investments for a First Exam

Rob Nijenkamp's research focuses on the question whether the sometimes rather large differences in the way resit exams are offered in higher education lead to differences in students' study behavior. His research begins with Kooreman's mathematically-grounded proposition that offering an unconditional resit opportunity provides a perverse incentive for students to put less time and effort into preparing for the first exam opportunity, possibly also resulting in a lower knowledge of the course materials. Experiments and (anonymous) questionnaire research into study strategies among first-year Psychology students showed that students are indeed sensitive to this perverse incentive and that they would use the possibility of a resit in their study planning. However, the study also showed that this reduction in time and effort for studying can be reduced, but not completely counteracted. This can be achieved by, for example, requiring a minimum grade on the first exam opportunity for participation in the resit or by increasing the amount of time between the two exam opportunities. The results of Rob Nijenkamp's research show that offering resits conditionally can reduce the perverse incentive to study less well, while at the same time preserving the features of a resit system that are good and helpful to students

Second Chances in Learning:Does a Resit Prospect Lower Study-Time Investments on a First Test?

Previous studies have shown that the prospect of a resit opportunity lowers hypothetical study-time investments for a first exam, as compared to a single-chance exam (i.e., the resit effect). The present paper describes a first experiment in which we aimed to generalize this effect from hypothetical study-time investments to a learning task allowing for the optimization of actual study-time investments while participants studied pairs of pseudowords for a subsequent multiple-choice test, given either a single chance or two chances to pass. Against our expectations, the results of the experiment showed no resit effect for the amount of actual time participants spent studying the materials in the experimental learning task. To better allow for the optimization of study-time investments, the learning task was adapted for a second experiment to include an indication of passing probability. These results, however, also did not show a resit effect. A third experiment addressed whether it was the investment of actual time that led to this absence of a resit effect with the learning task. The results suggested, however, that it was most likely the lack of a priori deliberation that caused this absence of the effect. Taken together with findings from a fourth questionnaire study showing that students seem to take a resit prospect into account by indicating they would have studied more for an exam if the option to resit would not have been available, these findings lead us to argue that a resit prospect may primarily affect advance study-time allocation decisions

Controlling the Resit Effect by Means of Investment Depreciation

In accordance with a rational model of study-time investment, we previously found that the prospect of a resit exam leads to lower investments of fictional study-time for a first exam opportunity in an investment game utilizing simulated exams. In the current study, we investigated whether the depreciation of one’s first-exam investment reduces the resit effect. Specifically, we investigated study-time investments for a simulated multiple-choice exam in which 0, 50, or 100% of the initial study-time investment was lost before the resit exam. In accordance with our predictions, we found that the magnitude of the resit effect decreased as investment depreciation increased. This finding suggests that the negative effect of resit exams on study-time investment may be countered by creating conditions under which investment depreciation (i.e. forgetting) is expected to occur, for instance, by increasing the temporal interval between the first attempt and resit exam