Yes, but ultimately, what matters most is how well a student has mastered the material.
Umm...you seem to have a bit of an axe to grind on some of your students. Do you have evidence that everyone needing multiple retakes is being lazy? What if they had pneumonia or a family member got cancer or whatever?
How do you distinguish between students who retake a hard course for a better grade due to laziness vs. those with, umm, noble motives? Plus, some less-arduous students become great employees; why do you seem to be trying to find a way to block them from even getting out of the starting gate? Let their employers worry about how they do on the job.
Just my two cents.
Val
It is not just me who wants to change the system, it is almost all university professors in the country where I live, plus the government. This surely indicates that there is a problem with the system. The new prestigious university programs ban retakes and make attendance of classes semi-obligatory, because this behavior is viewed as such a widespread problem here.
At the moment a student in the old style courses who takes 10 years to finish a 3 year degree, retaking every single course multiple times, not showing up for classes, not turning in assigments routinely, can end up the same grade transcript as a student who finishes in 3 years with no retakes and good attendance. The only clue to a prospective employer or graduate school is the number of years taken to finish the degree. However, this on its own is clearly not a fair indicator, as students may take longer to finish a degree for many reasons: family responsibilities, their need to work part-time etc.
The evidence accummulated by university committees is that it is mostly students who are not attending classes regularly, not submitting homework regularly, who demand multiple retakes of exams. Students who need to retake the occasional class because of illness, family problems, are in the minority. Under the proposed new rules, if they need to retake for such reasons most likely the earlier grade would not appear on the transcript. There is nothing but sympathy for such cases. From my experiences as a professor in American universities, the new rules would be in line with those in the US.
As to having an axe to grind: personally I teach graduate classes where this problem is not seen (not least because many of our students are American, and grew up with a different system). However, I do indeed think it's a waste of everybody's time that a student who attends only 1/3 of classes and does 1/3 of assignments for every course can demand 3 or 4 chances to pass final exams with only 40%, and then get passing grades on their transcript. Fortunately everybody else agrees with me and the system is going to change.
Clearly rules on retakes shouldn't be the same in schools as in universities.
