Different teachers approach things differently. In general at our school, if you spell more than 80% of the words correctly, you get an "alternate" list, onto which are tacked any words you misspelled (so you get 20 alternate words, plus the two that you missed from the regular list). If you get under 80% correct, you keep the regular list. Some teachers, however, start giving a standard type after 3 or 4 weeks - you're either always on the regular or always on the alternate.
I do know some parents who have requested that their kids use an alternate list all the time, and others who have their kids do alternate homework. For example, the kids can write a sentence and diagram it, write synonyms and antonyms or research word origin, instead of doing an ABC list or using in a sentence.
I think that even if they want her to keep the same list, you can challenge her.
Of all my kids, ds10 is the best speller. He rarely if ever misses a word on the pretest or the final test. I don't mind though, because this year his teacher doesn't make the kids do any homework if they do well (above 90?) on the pretest. If the only time waste for him is to spend the ten minutes in class writing it, I don't care. It's when he had super easy words AND had a lot of silly busy-homework that I was frustrated!
