Fresh starts and how they can improve testing

I'm currently doing my bachelor's in management and have always felt I'm being assessed unfairly. Most old-fashioned university teachers tend to limit the learners to one question or probably two if they're generous to evaluate the entire students' term performance. But what if I studied hard but missed that one particular question?

Fresh starts are a feature you can add to tests to make them more reliable. The more sections/questions there are in a test, the better chance the teacher has to assess the test-takers performance. As opposed to the old-fashioned testing systems that are put in purely to terrify the learner, fresh starts encourage learners to demonstrate their learning outcomes.

Adding more questions and different exercises (multiple-choice, true/false, etc.) may help learners check different types of their knowledge: receptive and productive. Similarly, varying the content, especially in subjective tests (speaking and writing), can offer the learners opportunities to use their background knowledge to produce language output.

It's much easier to include as many fresh starts as possible regarding objective tests such as direct language tests (e.g., grammar or vocabulary gap-filling). On the other hand, we teachers find ourselves or the course we're using asking the learners one question to test productive skills: write an essay or debate about a given topic. The key to adding fresh starts is offering alternative topics without changing the subskills. For example, instead of asking the students to write an essay about the danger of global warming, the learners can have three to five topics to choose from to write an essay about. This way, if they have no background about a given topic, they can still write about something else without being blocked by the content.

Modern course books come with ready-made tests, but that doesn't mean they have great reliability; it's worth checking and perhaps adding some questions or supplementing the content. It's also worth noting that adding fresh starts may require the teacher to adjust the time allotment to make the assessment more practical in the actual learning system.