Keep Resits. Just Redesign Them.

From scalable paperwork to live capability checks that actually reflect what business schools claim to value.

Resits.

I have a complicated relationship with them.

On paper, they make sense. One bad day should not nuke a semester. Students come in with uneven starting points. Schools need progression, not a bloodbath. Fine, I agree.

But let’s be honest about what most resits have become in business schools. They no longer measure mastery, they measure recovery. Compliance. Almost promote formatting skills. And now, in 2026, they often measure who can prompt, edit, and polish with the most confidence.

That’s not nothing. But it is not strategic capability.

The original logic of resits assumed something important: what a student produced under constraints was a decent proxy for what they could actually do. But today, that link is weaker. Most business schools drifted toward online, asynchronous, text based resits because they scale and they are administratively easy. But when the resit is an unsupervised essay or a take home video, we’re not testing thinking, we’re testing production.

And yes, research shows resits reduce anxiety and help performance. But they also reduce first attempt effort (students optimise, we know that), and if there’s a safety net, some will aim for it. So the question is not “resits yes or no”. The question is “what do we want the resit to measure and incentivise”.

But the bigger issue for me is design. Detection is not a strategy, and authenticity cannot be policed into existence. It has to be designed into the assessment itself. So if a resit is “submit an essay” or “submit a video”, it will almost always be scriptable. That’s not a moral judgement; it’s just the reality of the medium.

So here’s my take.

Keep resits. But stop treating them as “same exam, second try”. Make them proof of mastery. Narrow. Live. Diagnostic.

Here’s a format I would actually use because it is fair, scalable, and hard to game.

The Mastery Resit in three parts.

1. One page diagnostic autopsy.
   They write a short document answering: “What did I get wrong. What concept did I misunderstand. What changed in my reasoning.” Graded on clarity and honesty, not polish.

2. Ten minute viva.
   You ask: Two questions from the original exam outcomes. One transfer question with a twist, new context. And one challenge question, “defend your recommendation against a counterargument.”

3. Two minute weak signal sprint.
   A short prompt in real time and ask: “What signal matters. Why. What would you monitor next month.”

That’s it. Short. Clean. Hard to script.

And yes, I’d cap the resit grade at the pass threshold, or at a modest ceiling, so the incentive remains to take the first attempt seriously, and also, so it stays fair for the students who passed normally.

And maybe the contrarian view: the best resit reform is better assessment upstream. More small, low stakes proof points during the course. Fewer cliffs at the end. I do this already and I use it as collateral when grading finals.

Resits are not the enemy. Fossilised design is.