In Algebra II, I gave a quiz that I thought would last 20 minutes. When it dragged on for nearly the entire hour, I decided to just skip the lesson for that day. We quickly went over homework and the class was dismissed. I had a bad feeling about that quiz when I saw how long it took the class to do it. After grading it, I see that my feeling was right -- the class, as a whole, bombed it. I probably won't do anything about it, though. It seems like most of the mistakes were just dumb ones. A few of the papers indicated that the taker was clueless, but they were the minority. I am just going to tell the class that if anyone has any problems, see me after class and we'll work out something.
I gave a quiz in Algebra I, also. I took all of the questions directly out of homework so the kids can't complain that the test was harder then the homework. In fact, I am planning on telling the kids to check the answers to the quiz by looking at their homework. They did do the homework, hmm? By and large, both classes did very well on the quiz. That was good.