Alicia, thanks for your feedback. I really like your focus here and how you have established a true sense of education as your focus in how you implement assessments. There is a wide range of opinions on the issue of punishment, positive reinforcement, and weeding out of those that cannot demonstrate mastery of material. Too often however, the use of exams and quizzes are not used to measure understanding and effective delivery of a curriculum. If we have learned anything over the last 50 years of higher education, we have learned that there are different learning styles and different teaching styles and not all of them mix well with each other. Effective instructors are those that are willing to be critical of their own delivery methods and seek out new and different ways to help their students learn. The creative use of assessments is but one example of creative delivery of learning objectives. Regards, James Jackson