West High gets graded
After a turbulent few years during the pandemic, West High finally starts to settle down with a more organized and preparatory grading policy for its students.
A West High student works on their homework and classwork on April 17.
The administration of vaccines and rapid tests has pushed the COVID-19 pandemic and its societal modifications into the back of people’s minds. The lives of students are returning to normal, and West High has begun to transition back to traditional policies. After nearly three years of allowing students to turn in work until the last day of the trimester, administration is now enforcing a grading policy similar to pre-COVID learning.
Throughout the pandemic, West High went through different grading styles to better support students and create a safe learning environment. The 2021-2022 school year was the first ‘regular’ school year since the pandemic hit. Since many students had gotten used to online learning, easing back into the in-person classroom lifestyle was difficult, so West High implemented a grading system with the end of the trimester as the only hard deadline. This created an unbalanced schedule for students, with procrastination and lateness being accepted. Former West High student Alex Curtu ’22 reflects on her personal experience with this system.
“I definitely did not stick with deadlines, but I don’t think there’s anything that I waited until the actual end of the trimester,” Curtu said. “It was just if I needed an extra week or an extra few days because I had stuff going on.”
Being a student-athlete also played a factor in Curtu’s schedule.
“It was really nice to have lenient deadlines. I think that definitely made it a lot easier in junior year, especially because I was taking the hardest course load during that year on top of volleyball and the pandemic,” Curtu said.
Being a current student at the University of Pennsylvania, Curtu notices many similarities and differences between the rigors of West High and an Ivy League institution.
“I don’t think it necessarily prepared me but I also don’t think it gave me a shock because the deadlines were based on the circumstantial thing that we were going through, the pandemic was really hard, and a lot of my professors at Penn have mentioned that they’ve noticed students now especially need some extra support than students five years ago,” Curtu said.
In terms of academic preparedness, Curtu felt that her courses at West set her up for success immediately in college.
“I think this entire year has been so much easier than my hardest years at West, and the hardest classes that I took in high school. Junior year [of high school] was definitely the hardest year of academics I’ve ever had,” Curtu said.
While West High’s grading system seems to be ever-changing, a new one is already being tried out by current AP Statistics students. Gregory Witt, a math teacher and the only AP Statistics teacher at West, and his classes have been used as guinea pigs for a more assessment-heavy grading policy.
“Instead of getting points for homework, I’ll go in and check in to see if they did it, but 100% of their grade comes from their tests,” Witt said.
This new system puts more pressure on students to be responsible for their learning and decide when they feel homework is necessary for their success in a class.
“They have to be motivated to either want to do it to do better on the test or just want to do it to learn more,” Witt said.
This new form of learning and grading works well for Witt’s Advanced Placement course, but he does not envision this would work for every single course that West offers.
Current seniors at West High have gone through all sorts of different grading processes and policies because of the pandemic. From having pass or fail classes to 85% of their grades being assessments, sometimes the exact rules got lost among students. The 2021-2022 grading system allowed one hard deadline at the end of the term. While this could lead students to procrastinate work until the end of the trimester, it helped student-athletes pace themselves with their work, and not feel as stressed about missing school for games or competitions.
This was the same for senior Mitch Frey, a multi-sport athlete who is committed to Winona State University to play baseball. He remembers the more flexible grading system gave him more time to learn the material at his own pace while still receiving full credit for any assignments.
“While I’m in season, I feel like it’s nice to be able to turn stuff in at the end of the trimester if I’m doing the work anyway. But, if I’m out of season, I feel like I can understand where it’s nice to have the incentive of keeping you on task instead of being like,’ yeah, turn it in whatever’ and then you would just never do it because there’s no consequence,” Frey said.
For student-athletes and major procrastinators alike, the transition back to prior policies will be a big change. As society continues to transition as well, more pressure is added to high schools to make sure their students are prepared for the next step of their academic journey. While the future of the grading system is still in the works, experimenting with new and old systems puts West High one step closer to a pre-pandemic learning model.
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