We’ve all been there. There’s no doubt that every Choate student has experienced the sinking sensation when you realize you’ve got three graded assessments the very next day, whether it’s “quests,” quizzes, tests, or a dreaded combination of all three. A definite savior for students juggling too much at once is the policy for exemption on major tests. However, this policy has largely been passed down by word of mouth, resulting in vague conjecture and uncertainty among students. The School must end this ambiguity and clarify how it should be correctly applied.
Currently, the policy operates as follows: “If you have more than two major assessments scheduled, you are able to move the third one so that you don’t have more than two on a single day … that’s a policy that applies across all academic departments,” Director of Studies Ms. Kyra Jenney said. “The goal of it was to try to help students manage log jams in their workflow … to have three major assessments in one day, when [there] could be hours of preparation needed for just one [assessment], would be unfair to ask a student to do the night before an assignment.” The policy is intended to help students create a little more balance and flexibility to reschedule “major assessments” if they happen to be unlucky and have multiple teachers testing them on the same day.
The policy, despite being well-intentioned, risks undermining the actual workload many students face with its major versus minor distinction for granting exemptions. Currently, students could potentially have at least three graded evaluations that require studying and review — tests, quests, and quizzes — but only tests are classified as “a major assessment.” Under the literal wording of the policy, quizzes would not fall under the exempted category. “Quests,” which teachers often assign as hybrid quizzes and tests to alleviate the pressure of a conventional test, further confuse students by entering an undefined gray area.
Quests are ambiguous, as acknowledged by Ms. Jenney. “A quest doesn’t fit neatly … A quest, if it is significantly fewer points than a test, would be a minor assessment. That doesn’t mean it is not a high value assignment, but it is not the highest value assignment that that course offers. So there’s a little bit more gray area, but the idea is that a quest would be fewer points or less weight in the overall course grade compared to a major in-class assignment, like a unit test or a large paper project.” This reflects the variability among teachers, because different teachers use different grading systems. For example, a test worth 100 points might account for a huge percentage of a term grade, but in another class a 100-point test could only be one of many factors for the term grade.
“I think that what counts as a large or small assessment varies by class, as does difficulty, so such things are hard to manage,” Zachary Brenner ’29 said. If the policy is intended to reduce academic stress, a system that does not consider the actual pressure and time needed to study for each individual test is insufficient. Moreover, how can the policy be properly implemented if students and teachers alike don’t even know when the policy applies, and what is classified as a “major assessment”?
For quizzes and quests, factors such as the amount of content needed to prepare, the length of evaluation, and the final weight of the evaluation toward the final grade must be considered rather than simply singling out “major assessments,” which are vaguely defined. For instance, if an assessment includes content from five or more class periods, then it might make sense to classify it as “major.” The school has an obligation to clarify these distinctions.
In this way, the basis on which students are allowed to push one evaluation further back must be placed on measurable factors, including the amount of content that needs to be prepared for the test, the weight toward the class grade, and the amount of time preparation for the test takes. It should be recognized that there is a clear difference between a five-minute quiz on last night’s reading and a unit “quiz.”
The current policy does not address the grey area of a “major” or “minor” assessment; the School must explicitly list what amount of content or preparation required designates a test in either category student or academic handbooks. Otherwise, the existing policy will remain vastly arbitrary, and will not fully serve the needs of students as intended.