This is my first post in this tribe - Hello everybody!
We just had our last day of the year with kids yesterday. I taught 4 classes of 6th grade physical science, and two of 8th grade Earth Science. We have a fairly high powered school, where high academic achievement is the norm. All year I had been giving tests where we would go over the material (pretty much the exact test shown on an overhead), I would post it on the internet, and they could study up on it all they wanted, then we would take it the next day. The tests were short, so I would grade it in two days and get them right back. Then, we would go over them, and they could make test corrections and get half credit per question back for each correction.
The kids became comfortable with this technique, and they seemed to like getting really high grades and really getting the material.
But, for the end of the year finals,,, I gave them a smoking hard - really long brain teaser test. They got to use all the notes we took for the year, there books, and cheat sheets they made the day before... But, they didn't get to preview the "look" of the test this time.
We only had two more days of school left after it,, so instead of taking 20 hours of my end of the year winding down time with grading super long tests with all the different forms of hand writing, utensil coloring, and paper assortments, I had them grade their own papers!
Another teacher said, "I heard you had them grade their own finals! Great idea! I'm sure that kept them busy."
True enough, but, THEY DID GREAT! It worked out fine!

Here's the class website if anyone's interested:
animaldreams.net/school/student.html

Dave