I graded our DOL-type quiz over the weekend and found the scores were atrocious. The teacher grades them differently from how I do. She does not take off points if the students get something extra wrong (i.e. they try to "fix" something that's already correct), and I do. I started thinking about whether it's "fair" to ask something for a grade we haven't covered in class. In a way, of course it's fair! Students are already supposed to know all this -- capitalization, punctuation, grammar, spelling, but for example, a huge number of them missed "plain" instead of "plane," "there" instead of "their" when we hadn't gone over it the previous week.
I'm not sure there is an answer to this question. We can't start over at the beginning for everything, but neither can we let students continue to miss points for things we haven't directly addressed in class. Things like this are worse with struggling students, because we tend to re-teach content every single year, esp the "basics" like grammar, spelling, math facts, and on and on. When is it fair game for testing, though?
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