Rose basketball highlights
FRI.| 4-12-24 | ENTERTAINMENT
Issue 1
September 27th, 2019
New exam policy motivates students
SAT. | 11-13-21 | NEWS
SAT. | 10-10-20 | NEWS
Midway through the first semester of the 2021-2022 school year, the Rose exam exemption policy was updated.
Last year, the only exams that were required for Rose students were End Of Course (EOC), Advanced Placement (AP) and Career and Technical Education (CTE) exams. This year, students who are in CTE classes, AP classes and classes that have EOCs are still required to take their final exam, but students taking courses that have teacher-made final exams can be granted exemptions.
Fine Arts department chair and teacher Randall Leach believes that this new policy change is positive and necessary with the changing state of pandemic learning.
“Any student with an A or B in classes with teacher-made exams will not have to take a final exam, [but] you can choose to take the exam and if it raises your final grade, you can keep the score and the new grade,” said Leach.
Leach also believes that this policy will help motivate students to work hard in their classes during the year, but wishes that the decision had come sooner.
“I wish it would have come to us earlier,” said Leach. “If we would've known that this was the policy, we could have pushed it from day one to motivate students to keep their grades up so they could have the choice to take the exam.”
Freshman Asi’yanna Whitehurst agrees that this policy is a good motivator for her and her peers to work hard in their classes.
“Now I try to keep my grades up so I don’t have to take a big test at the end of the semester,” said Whitehurst. “I think [the policy] will also motivate other students who don't like big tests like me.”
In the past, exam exemptions only occurred when
Photo by Eleanor Blount
students had either an A and three or less absences or a B and two or less absences in a class with a teacher-made final exam. Due to the large portion of students missing school due to the spread of COVID-19, the attendance policy has been dropped, but the grade standards still stand.
Junior Caroline Ogle was a freshman at Rose when the old exam exemption policy was in place, but she likes the new policy better because of the focus taken off of attendance.
“[The policy] was somewhat annoying because I had braces at the time so I had to miss school to go to dentist appointments and things like that,” said Ogle.
Ogle ended up having to take a teacher-made exam for her Math 2 class during her freshman year because she had three absences and a B in the class.
Ogle believes that the new exam exemption policy is a positive for most students, as many high schoolers battle testing anxiety and have to deal with the negative consequences of this anxiety when required to take a final exam.
“I think [exams] are a good way to measure where students stand, but I don’t know that they're a completely fair assessment of students’ understanding because some people are bad at testing and remembering all of the information from the whole semester or year-long classes,” said Ogle.
