Almost all Stuyvesant students have a common concern: grades. As finals week approaches and students have a last opportunity to pull up their grades, they begin to question their mastery of curricula. Department-wide finals are especially nerve-wracking for students whose classes have not covered the entire syllabus.
Across the New York City public school system, the Department of Education is setting up more regulations to standardize both grades and curricula. This move is increasingly affecting Stuyvesant’s own policies. Principal Stanley Teitel gave the Assistant Principal (AP) of each department an evaluation of the grades their teachers gave during the second marking period of the fall term. The assessment included the distribution of the low, mean and high grades given by each teacher.
While Teitel and AP Technology Edward Wong have analyzed this data in the past, Spring 2007 was the first time Teitel released Regents grades organized by teacher to the respective APs. Publicizing this information was meant to ensure that APs were aware of grading discrepancies within their department, and to motivate them to address the problem of standardized finals tacked on to an unstructured curriculum.
Standardizing tests without standardizing courses means many classes either have to cram the remainder of the curriculum into the last weeks of classes, or students are forced to teach themselves the information. Without the guidance of a teacher, questions are left unanswered and concepts remain unclear. Even if students are successful in covering all the material, they cannot fully comprehend it in such a short time period.
To ensure this does not happen, social studies, world language, biology, mathematics and technology courses could mirror the diagnostics given by chemistry and physics. The purpose of diagnostics should not be to grade the student, but to assess the teacher. Frequent diagnostic tests would serve as better measures of teacher performance if they were unannounced. They would not measure students’ ability to cram, but rather the effectiveness of teachers’ lessons. Obviously, grades from these diagnostic tests should not be factored into grade point averages.
Increasingly standardized tests would inevitably require uniform curricula. However, this uniformity has its drawbacks. Teachers bring their own experiences and strengths to their classes, each of which has a unique group dynamic. This individuality must not be sacrificed. Each department, and Stuyvesant as a whole, must strike a balance between standardization and individuality.
