Second Chances: Letting Students Retake Their Work
We tell students that mistakes are how you learn, and then we grade the assignment like the first try is the only one that counts. A kid rushes a reading quiz during a rough morning, gets a 4/10, and that number follows them the rest of the quarter. If you wanted to give them another shot, you were resetting submissions by hand, one student at a time, hoping you didn't hand them the answer key in the process. With v4.1.0, Multiple Attempts makes retakes something you turn on once and then forget about — and it handles the awkward parts (which grade counts, what they can see between tries) for you.
The Trouble With One Try
A single attempt turns every assignment into a high-stakes moment, whether you meant it to be or not. The student who freezes on a timed quiz, the one who misread the prompt, the one whose Wi-Fi dropped mid-recording — they all end up with a grade that says more about that one bad ten minutes than about what they actually know.
You could let them redo it. You just had to do it manually: find the submission, delete it, remind them to try again, and cross your fingers that they hadn't already seen the correct answers on the results page. Do that for five kids across three classes and it's an afternoon. Multiple Attempts is the built-in version of that generosity, minus the afternoon.
Turning It On
It's a single switch when you create or edit any reading, listening, writing, oral, or quiz assignment. Flip it on, decide how many tries each student gets — two, three, five, or unlimited — and you're done. Whatever you picked last time is remembered, so if you always give three, you set it once.
After a student finishes an attempt, they see a clean summary of every try they've taken and a button to start the next one. You see the same history on your end, with each attempt laid out and every score still editable.
Which Grade Actually Counts
This is the question every teacher asks first, and you get to answer it per assignment:
Keep their best attempt. The one most teachers reach for — it rewards the kid who kept working at it until they got it.
Take the mean of every attempt. Good when you want the retake to help without erasing the fact that the first one happened.
Keep the most recent try, whatever it is. Best for genuine 'redo it properly' situations where the newest version is the real one.
The gradebook always shows the kept grade, and it updates itself as new attempts come in. If a student's scores are 11, then 9, and you chose Average, the grade is 10 — and yes, it keeps the decimals; it won't quietly round a 10.5 up to 11.
What They See Between Tries
Here's the part that makes retakes actually work instead of turning into a copy-the-answer-key exercise. You decide how much a student sees between attempts — before they're done for good:
Just a confirmation that the attempt was submitted. They go into the next try blind — best for real reassessment.
Their number, and nothing else. Enough to know whether it's worth trying again, without any hints about which questions to fix.
Their score and the answers they gave, but not the correct ones. They can review what they wrote without being handed the key.
Full results between every attempt. For low-stakes practice where you want them studying the feedback before the next go.
The important bit: unless you choose "Everything," the correct answers and full feedback stay hidden until the student is genuinely finished. Nobody gets to peek at the key, retake, and post a perfect score.
When Full Results Show Up
Full results — the correct answers, the feedback, the rubric breakdown — unlock when a student has used up their attempts and your normal results-release timing says it's okay. Those two conditions work together, so nothing leaks early.
If you release results immediately, they see everything the moment they run out of tries. If you release after the due date, they wait until the deadline passes even if they finished early — which quietly solves the "first kid done texts the answers to everyone" problem. And if you release manually, results wait for you. Extensions are respected too: a student with extra time hits every one of these moments on their deadline, not the rest of the class's.
"I'm Happy With This One"
Sometimes a student nails it on try two and doesn't want to burn a third attempt just to see their feedback. When their results are ready to release, they get a View Full Results Now button that trades their remaining attempts for the full picture, right away. It asks them to confirm, because it can't be undone from their side — but if they change their mind, you can reopen their attempts with one click from their results page.
You're Still Holding the Pen
Attempts don't take grading out of your hands. Open any student's results and you can edit any attempt — adjust a score, fix a rubric category, add a note — and the kept grade recalculates itself. Override the final grade by hand and a little Reset button appears in case you want to snap it back to the method-based number. Everything you can do to a normal submission, you can still do here, one attempt at a time.
Change your mind about the settings later? Lower the number of attempts and Lingua walks you through what to do about students who already went over. Raise it after some students gave up their tries, and it offers to reopen them. And if you use Canvas, only the kept grade syncs across — and it re-syncs every time that grade changes.
Pairs Nicely With Variation
If you read the last release notes, you already met Assignment Variation — every student getting a different-but-equal version of the same work. Retakes and variation are a natural pair: let students try again, and if you've turned on question banks, they can even get a fresh set of questions on the next attempt instead of memorizing their way to a score. Between the two, a retake becomes a real second chance to learn, not a second chance to guess.
What it comes down to
Multiple Attempts lets you grade for what a student ends up knowing instead of how their first ten minutes went — with the answer key staying locked until they're done, the grade you chose keeping itself up to date, and you still able to step in on any single try. Turn it on once, and second chances stop being an afternoon of manual work.