It’s that time of the year again. The time when Stuyvesant students are reviewing between class periods, during class periods, and in any other seconds of their free time. AP fever is spreading like wildfire, and attendance rates are dropping considerably as students opt to use their time to review for tests rather than attend classes.

But is this a point of concern? Is the atmosphere that consumes Stuyvesant during the month of May a telltale sign of education gone wrong? Should the administration be tightening the AP course selection process to prevent students from getting caught up in this chaotic atmosphere?

We don’t think so. In fact, we believe that the Stuyvesant administration should consider taking steps to allow our underclassmen to have a greater variety of AP course selections to choose from.

Currently, freshmen are not offered AP classes unless they demonstrate abilities significant enough to be placed in one, and sophomores are only allowed to sign up for AP European History, AP World History, or, in some cases, AP Physics B. There exists, as a result, a great disparity between the number of AP courses that Stuyvesant offers and the number of AP courses that Stuyvesant’s underclassmen can take.

Offering ambitious underclassmen a wider selection of AP courses will have three main benefits. First, it will allow them to explore and experience rigorous curriculums early on. Second, by spreading out the AP courses we take over four years instead of two, students will be able to take more courses than they currently can. Third, though we acknowledge that rankings come second to the educational benefits that this potential plan could provide to students, offering more APs will undoubtedly raise Stuyvesant’s ranking on numerous “Best Schools” lists.

Stuyvesant students deserve these opportunities. They are not only some of the smartest students in the city but perhaps the most ambitious as well; they consistently demonstrate their desire to challenge themselves and learn. For certain students, exposure to more topics in greater depth would be far more educationally beneficial than an introductory course in Regents Biology. These students should be encouraged to push themselves in this way and not face deterrence from the administration.

Many underclassmen have free periods, and many upperclassmen cannot fit all the classes they want into their schedule. During the first two years of high school, students often find themselves with one or two free periods and no easy way to fill them. Electives fill quickly and give priority to upperclassmen; APs are, of course, largely unavailable to them. However, many upperclassmen find themselves with full schedules and are disappointed that they cannot take all the classes they want. There are simply not enough periods in the day for them to learn everything they want to.

This strange divide between underclassmen and upperclassmen is completely unnecessary and puts an unfair burden on students in their junior and senior years. Being seventeen rather than sixteen does not make someone more qualified to take an AP course. By recognizing that sophomores are able to handle AP work, we would be able to relieve some of the pressure on Stuyvesant’s upperclassmen. Rather than trying to cram eight APs into the last two years of high school, students would be able to spread them around. Freshman and sophomore year would be more engaging, and students would more easily be able to graduate having taken all the classes they desire.

Furthermore, many newspapers, such as the US News and World Report, judge high schools based on the proportion of students that take and pass AP courses. Though this seems like an arbitrary method of measuring academic efficacy, it’s true that AP tests are perceived as offering a fairly accurate indicator of academic mastery of a topic. Unfair or not, the “College Readiness Index” that US News and World Report uses to judge American high schools holds some significance. By allowing more students to take AP classes as underclassmen, we would not just be boosting our rankings. We would be teaching students the skills and information they need to excel in high school, college, and beyond.

We recognize that a lot of this is easier said than done. Offering AP classes to underclassmen would require a drastic increase in the number of sections of certain classes. But perhaps the problem isn’t the availability of funding but the inability to use it for this very worthy cause. Our school is well-endowed and frequently demonstrates its financial flexibility with construction projects and technological advancements. This contrasts with Bronx Science, a school that is far less aesthetically pleasing than ours but offers 19 sections of AP Psychology, a daunting number compared to our two.

Opening up our courses to underclassmen is the right thing to do. Not only does it increase exposure and allow students to explore, but it also decreases the perceived need for AP-crammed schedules in junior and senior year. Furthermore, though less important, it would also give us a boost in our ratings and would put us closer to schools like Townsend Harris and Brooklyn Latin, whose percentage of students taking APs hovers at 100 percent and 97 percent respectively.

As the administration reconsiders its AP selection policy, we urge it to reconsider a huge barrier for admissions that has been consistently been overlooked: grade level.

Curriculum and Testing

1. While Stuyvesant harbors many teachers who are more than capable of leading engaging discussions and teaching outside of the box, many—if not all—of the departments are trapped in a teach-to-test policy. Advanced Placement (AP) classes are geared toward the AP exam in May. But even in many standard classes, the day a new unit is introduced is the same day that the unit’s test date is determined. Of course, tests are necessary. They act as vital indicators of how much a student understands. But a teach-to-test practice only ends up harming us; it emphasizes acing the test over learning the material, thus structuring classes around a rigid format that, instead of encouraging creativity and exploration, fosters a “know it or fail” mentality in students.

2. Though the standard Stuyvesant curriculum exposes us to many courses that other high schoolers don’t even have the privilege to take, Stuyvesant’s strict graduation requirements restrict us from taking certain, desired classes—and forcing us to take others that we will most likely not even re-encounter after high school. Furthermore, the fact that we must take co-requisites for classes like AP Biology (offered in many high schools to freshmen) is somewhat ridiculous. Yes, our curriculum is varied, but taking an introductory class to technical drawing does not necessarily make us more well-rounded people. If Stuyvesant were to loosen up its graduation requirements, students would be able to take more classes geared toward their actual interests. Isn’t that what learning is about—pursuing fields that pique your interest? Is that too much to ask for?
Teachers and Teaching

1. Teachers at Stuyvesant expect students to excel in their classes, which, in part, requires completing various forms of written work: daily homework assignments, tests, and essays or projects. Since our daily workload often exceeds the time it would take to complete each assignment to the best of our abilities, we tend to put more effort into assignments our teachers are sure to check or collect. Even if an assignment is collected, it may be returned with nothing more than a grade and little explanation of what justified it. If a project is handed in at the end of the spring term, it isn’t rare for it to go unreturned before school is out for the summer, and if we’re lucky, we find it in a pile in homeroom on the first day of the following school year. As for tests, written portions are generally returned with comments only if mistakes were made, and multiple choice tests very rarely have involve any feedback. Some of our teachers hardly even offer to spend a period going through the test—a disheartening fact considering how tests become numbers to factor into our GPAs and not microcosms of the learning experience. Reviewing tests should be emphasized as much as the tests themselves are.

2. When we take our first step into our classrooms at the beginning of freshman year, it appears that every teacher is intent on reminding us that we aren’t that smart: we just work hard and fill in bubbles. If we are capable of scoring in the top two percent, then we can do anything they demand. Many teachers expect their students to finish all the work they assign and rarely ever stop to ask if it is too much.
And is it too much? Yes, it is. It is nearly impossible to make every class our top priority, and study for tests, get involved in the extracurricular activities we enjoy, prepare for college, and get enough sleep to perpetuate the cycle. The constant pressure Stuyvesant students receive from their teachers feeds into an unhealthy culture where students take on more responsibilities than they can handle. We are expected to robotically excel through our ten-period schedules, even if we burn out in the end. We have reached the point where such expectations are absurd, yet have already been so deeply ingrained into the Stuyvesant mindset that our struggles are merely a joke. But when at one in the morning we are sitting in front of a math problem or half-written essay due the next day, trying to keep our eyes open even as the rest of our family is asleep, trying not wake them up as we print out the aforementioned half-written essay, it’s difficult to see the humor in it all.
Perhaps we aren’t seeing the whole story. After all, teachers must have work and responsibilities of their own. And as a school community, it’s time that we started to recognize that there is life outside of these walls.

3. It’s become a trite remark in the educational field to say that everyone learns differently—but it’s true. Due to the competitive atmosphere at Stuyvesant, students look for anything that will give them an advantage in the classroom, either through test prep or extra study. However, the students who cannot take extra classes or tutoring but still have difficulty understanding the subject matter become lost in the spotlight of the better-prepared. We can see that the teachers are put in a difficult situation. If they move too slowly, the more advanced students are not challenged enough; if they teach too quickly, the rest of the class is left trailing behind. But the disparities are due to their rigid structures of teaching, which do not account for different students. While this is true in all of the departments, the language department is what first comes to mind. Even though some of the more advanced native speakers begin in higher-level classes, there are still native speakers who start in beginner classes with those who do not know anything. Because the more advanced students already understand confusing concepts that the rest of us fail to grasp, the teachers believe that the whole class understands. They then move on, and to avoid disrupting the class, the others stay silent and try to learn the concept later. With the exception of after-school tutoring, this system of treating all of the students as the same simply does not work. We are not all the same.

6. The traditional signs of bullying, such as physically harm or stealing lunch money, are absent, or at least uncommon, at Stuyvesant. The type of bullying most common at Stuy is cyber bullying. Students send hate messages anonymously through websites like Formspring and ask.fm. Other extreme examples of bullying include the “Burn Book,” a tumblr created last year where students could anonymously insult other students, and the “Social Tree,” a diagram created to group students by social cliques, something straight out of “Mean Girls.” Though Stuyvesant is spared from traditional acts of bullying, it is plagued with a version that is perhaps even more dangerous.

7. Most Stuyvesant students are well-behaved and understand the fact that blatantly showing disrespect toward teachers in the classroom and school officials disrupts the learning of their peers and worsens the school’s environment. However, students’ attitudes toward teachers and school officials are becoming increasingly negative as students become more disgruntled with their teachers’ flaws and the restrictive policies that adults in the school must administer. Students are more than likely to gossip about or “trash talk” certain teachers they aren’t keen on, and have visibly shown frustration toward adults over an administrative rule—such as the newly altered “first, second, or fifth” rule—plenty of times. Though the relationship between Stuyvesant students and adults isn’t idyllic, it is still comparatively healthier than those of other schools.

8. If a Speech and Debate team member tells a teacher about missing class for a national tournament, the teacher will probably smile and wish the student good luck. If a student athlete tells a teacher about missing class for a big game, the teacher will probably mumble something about getting the notes from a classmate. At Stuyvesant, the large student athlete population garners little respect from teachers and non-athletes alike. Participating in a sport is often trivialized, whereas academics and intellectual extracurriculars are championed. Apart from the occasional, largely-ignored morning announcement, student athletes are rarely acknowledged in the school community. Their accomplishments are often dismissed, and the difficulties they face in balancing sports and school are almost entirely overlooked.

9. When students get their exam grades back, there is usually an air of anxiety mixed with excitement. Most students look around in desperation to see where their exams lie in the grade spectrum. They create an internal list in their heads of names and corresponding scores. Once sufficient data is collected, they either smile at the thought of their superior grades or cringe because they are doing comparatively poorly. In this competitive environment, students are not happy for other’s achievements. None of us want to be on the sidelines. Although we may care genuinely for the well-being of our peers, behind every congratulations is envy that questions our own self-worth.

10. Despite our school’s attempt at creating a comprehensive Student Union (SU), the students involved in this program fail to accomplish their goals despite any amount of drive or focus they may bring to the table of student government. Why is that? Simply stated, the administration has the final say in students’ decisions, and given our highly conservative administration, any form of change seems unlikely, if not impossible. Moreover, the SU is trapped in a consistent cycle of beginning the school year with enthusiasm and presence, only to peter out until May, when new students promise to bring us a new, functioning SU.

11. The administration vacillates when responding to broken rules. Walk into school breaking the dress code one day and you’ll be reprimanded; walk in a week later dressed the same way and what have we here? Furthermore, the administration has not acted in a concrete way in regard to reprimanding cell phone usage. Cell phones are confiscated seemingly at random, and the limits of confiscation are ambiguous. Students may also lose their lunch privileges for extended periods of time for seemingly petty acts such as eating in hallways. How much power does the administration have to punish students? What are the consequences for breaking the rules? It is entirely unclear.

The concept of school spirit is somewhat abstract. In the age of Glee and High School Musical, many might expect a high school community to rally around its football team or cultural clubs in awe, proud to be part of the larger group for its victories and achievements. In fact, this idea of spirit stems from a monocultural assortment of interests and activities. When, like in High School Musical, basketball is the sole interest of the overwhelming majority of the student body, basketball games will be the center of the school’s community.

But what about us?

Stuyvesant’s student body obviously does not gravitate toward sporting events or glee club performances. Except for SING!, there are hardly any times during the year when a significant portion of students are even in the same room. But does this show a lack of spirit? Does this render the atmosphere of the school cold, unfriendly, and impersonal, as so many students attest? Where is our spirit? Where is our sense of community? Are we going about school spirit incorrectly?

To the contrary, Stuyvesant fosters a unique, diverse form of school community that arises from the plethora of interests present among the student body. With 32 varsity teams and over 130 clubs, almost everyone has the opportunity to shine in something of interest to them, rather than participate in whatever happens to be popular. No single club, team, or activity captures the majority of students’ interests, and this is to the advantage of students with enthusiasm for unconventional or less popular areas. Tech-savvy robotics team members, environmental activists, and lacrosse players coexist without any rivalry; there is an atmosphere of “live and let live.”

The individual can thrive in this environment. Anyone can pursue almost any course without social alienation. Who has ever been ostracized at Stuyvesant for failing to join a sports team? Nobody. Stuyvesant students can truly find themselves in an authentic and uplifting way.

Stuyvesant’s individualistic spirit is also fueled by thirst for achievement. Although students are highly supportive of each other’s accomplishments, neither football stars nor Intel winners are lionized by the school as a whole. Nobody wants to look up to the best, because many want to be on the top themselves. Students will not sit on the sidelines, as this does nothing to bolster their records or ideas of self-worth in any way.

This achievement-oriented environment permits little opportunity for a singular school identity, because pride in others is too often tainted by jealousy of them—everyone wants to be a star. Jealousy, which is usually frowned upon in American high schools, acts here as a powerful and beneficial motivator, prompting students to pursue their interests and climb to the top. It is what makes our student body one of the most impressive in the nation.

The recent push for unification of sports team names illustrates the conflict between unity and individualism. Supporters of this proposal believe that unifying the school around one mascot and one team name will give students a sense of common identity, bringing them together. Yet this proposal has been repeatedly rejected by Stuyvesant’s sports teams, demonstrating that for Stuyvesant students, the collective identity of like-minded teammates is more important than school-wide unity.

This is not to say that Stuyvesant students only look out for themselves. One need only look to SING! for a shining example of what happens when our brilliant talents collaborate to form a common product. SING! takes advantage of the vast array of interests at Stuyvesant in an atmosphere of camaraderie and high spirits. Interest groups as far-reaching as musicians, martial arts enthusiasts, and photographers work together toward a goal.

But despite all the benefits that come from such a competitive, and arguably spiritless, school, should we really be praising this fragmented environment? While individualistic opportunities are nearly unmatched at our school, is being deprived of a true school community worth it?

Cliché or not, there is something comforting about an entire school coming together to watch a football game every Friday night. This sense of unity and togetherness seems to be lacking in Stuyvesant, where the only major “spirit event,” SING!, is actually a competition between grades. While SING! certainly boosts intra-grade community, it also fosters rivalry and does little to bring the school together as a whole. Often, the best-received jokes (and, ironically, some of the only jokes not censored by the administration) are barbs at the other grades.

Our inability to truly come together at critical moments further demonstrates the absence of school-wide unity. Events such as the death of a student or the colossal damage of Hurricane Sandy warrant little more than a brief moment of silence or a seemingly invisible jeans-collection box on the first floor. Our individual schedules go on as planned.

Stuyvesant’s widespread individual ambition fosters a high-pressure environment where discussion of grades, accomplishments, and self-worth is perpetual. Rather than submit to insignificance, nearly everyone in our community jostles for the spotlight. The causative forces behind the vast success of Stuyvesant students and their high risk of nervous breakdowns are the same.

Stuyvesant may not be home to the football-and-cheerleader culture that characterizes the average American high school, but this school definitely breeds its own unique form of spirit. Diversity and ambition drive students to the top in a wide assortment of fields, both conventional and obscure, creating small subcultures with few commonalities in place of an overarching school culture. We may sacrifice some sense of identity or community; we may encounter antagonism from our peers rather than support and befriend only people with common interests. But isn’t that what makes us Stuyvesant? Isn’t that why we are here?

The programming process not only lacks uniformity but also is full of absurd regulations and unfair policies. Official “request” forms are required but seldom completed, assistant principal signatures are often ignored, and special exceptions are always made. Cunning students are able to take advantage of the system. The gift of a flexible guidance counselor or a persistent parent can generate an unfair advantage, creating an incentive to play the system.

Perhaps the most lasting image and legacy of the current system, though, is the suffocating visit to the auditorium.  Every student wishing to change his or her schedule, even for the slightest tweak, must jostle with thousands of classmates for the ability to talk to a guidance counselor for mere seconds. Urgency, necessity, and convenience for programming changes are ignored. Schedule changes have become the survival of the loudest, fastest, and fittest.

We need to abolish this archaic system and replace it with a more modern one.

Moving programming online is the first step. The administration ought to create a website that lists every class and the corresponding instructor, period, and number of vacant seats. Students would be able to obtain required information efficiently, without piling additional work on guidance counselors or having to traverse multiple social media outlets, thereby conserving time for everyone.

Upon opening, the programming process should offer the opportunity to request classes and teachers rather than simply select the generic courses we do now. After the traditional placement process, the programming office should host an online “trading floor” to accommodate students wishing to exchange classes, periods, and teachers. Painless changes could occur online automatically. Students could optimize their schedules and the administration could avoid the hassles that plague the current system. To prevent users from identifying themselves on the trading floor (and hence from edging toward a dangerous trend of selling classes), the website would enforce anonymity, centering program changes around an unbiased, balanced, and efficient system.

Another change worth considering is the release of schedules at least two weeks before the beginning of the new semester. Under the current system, programs are released on the first day of the semester, during homeroom. Allowing students access to their programs beforehand, however, would eliminate some of the unnecessary congestion while allowing every student to start off on the same foot. In the current system, students, after receiving schedules in homeroom, must dishearteningly await their grade’s after-school programming changes session. Earlier schedules and program changes eliminate the disadvantage students experience when entering classes often a week after every other student has already settled in.
Luckily, the administration is headed in the right direction. Most notably, the active participation of Interim Acting Principal Jie Zhang in helping students with programming is representative of a small change in philosophy received warmly by the student body. (See Jack Cahn’s Op-Ed, titled “We Want Ms. Zhang.”)

A lot of the solutions that The Spectator has proposed are easier said than done. The task of designing algorithms and supplementary programs to handle the scheduling issues of more than three thousand students should not be underestimated. Furthermore, the programming office is not a cloistered world; many programming officers, including Sophia Liang and Rosa Mazzurco, teach classes on top of their programming duties. Scheduling takes time, effort, and skill, and as we are caught up in our own frustrations, we overlook the amount of work that the programming staff dedicates to building optimal programs.

It is precisely out of respect for the programming office, however, that The Spectator offers this plan of action. The time is ripe for experimentation. Just as importantly, it’s time to be rid of the lines of students waiting in the auditorium, the number of transfers made during the first days of a new semester, and the pervasive stress resulting from competition for coveted teachers and electives. None of this chaos is fair for anyone involved, especially not the programming staff. So let us move the present inefficiency and uncertainty to the past and propel to the future of programming with 21st century changes.

There are just as many college-ready, elite Asian American students across this nation as white students. However, due to legacy practices and the need to preserve “tradition,” Ivy League schools are restricting the number of Asian Americans they accept. Legacy admissions policies, where students are admitted on a basis of donation-potential alone (often due to having had family already attend the college), have become standard in college admissions offices. These students are far less qualified than non-legacy students of any race, but because they come from predominantly white, upper-class families they are considered more desirable. Recently, the Harvard Crimson published a statistic that 30 percent of legacy applicants are admitted, about four times the regular acceptance rate. That is unacceptable. Ivy league schools fail to carry out the holistic admissions process they promise in information sessions, giving priority to legacy students instead. In comparison, Stuyvesant’s Harvard acceptance rate over the last four years is 10.17 percent, and that’s including legacy students.

Students of all races at Stuyvesant are being looked over because of legacy policies. However, statistics indicate that Asian Americans are being shut out more than any other group. Harvard, one of the schools many Stuyvesant students dream of attending, is infamous for both its favorable policies toward legacy students and its unfavorable policies toward Asian American students. Along with other elite universities on the east coast, Harvard maintains specific percentages of each racial group. According to the New York Times, the percentage of Asian students has stayed around 20 percent since the 1990s. Meanwhile, white representation at the school stays close to 60 percent. In the California system, which implements race-blind admissions policies, Asian representative is closer to 40 percent. This difference indicates that Harvard and other Ivy league schools either have utterly different systems of assessing their applicants or they have determined that Asian students are less desirable as a group.

            This bias against Asian students isn’t seen only in admission demographics. Take the SAT, a test we all have ample experience with. For high school students, it is often considered to be one of the most important steps into acing the college admissions process: a no-nonsense way to show the world your abilities through a cold hard score. But a recent analysis of Princeton University’s admissions statistics by Thomas Espenshade revealed that, in order to gain acceptance to this prestigious university, an Asian American student needed to score an average of 140 points higher than a white applicant and 450 higher than an African American one on an SAT scored out of 1600. The numbers speak for themselves.

To think that these students are being denied acceptance because of their race makes it easy to lose faith in the college process. That hard work and a dazzling resume may not pay off in the way we’ve all been told is incredibly disheartening to any student, Asian American or otherwise.

It’d be easy to point to these students and say that Harvard rejections will not ruin their lives. But for those who make it past the quotas, a greater hurdle looms: the price of tuition. At Stuyvesant, it is no secret that many of us come from immigrant families that cannot afford to pay college tuition – we’re a Title I school, meaning that 40 percent or more of the students in attendance are on free or reduced lunch. A result of this is an “Ivy or bust” attitude in many Stuyvesant families. Why is that? It’s not due to ignorance or arrogance. It’s because Ivies and other wealthy universities tend to be more far more generous with their aid packages. Other respected private institutions will tell you to take out a loan, a loan that will follow you for the rest of your life. This is the real problem. Tuition is shooting up and little is being done to combat it. Our nation’s top universities would rather continue a policy of race-based affirmative action than actively help students who are living in poverty. Across the board, students from any racial group are more likely to attend college if their family is affluent. A study conducted by Denver University showed that students in the top quartile were 25 times more likely to attend elite universities than those from the lowest quartile. The “American dream” is shattered for many Stuyvesant students every spring because they can’t afford the education that will allow them to raise their families’ economic status.

Rather than focusing on maintaining status quo racial breakdowns, colleges need to promote admissions policies with emphasis on merit rather than parental alma matters, and class diversity rather than racial diversity. What difference does the color of one’s skin make if everybody is coming from similar upper middle class backgrounds and has similarly affluent parents back home? Learning alongside students from all walks of life can give you more insight into how the world works than taking a class as perfectly mixed as the cover of an admissions brochure. Colleges need to start playing fair and granting education to those who truly deserve it.

Please don’t take away our good teachers.

As Governor and head of the new NY Education Reform Commission, you have the power to make sure that the New York public education system “puts students first,” a phrase you have coined as your main priority for several months now.

We have one request: keep the good teachers. Use this new commission as an opportunity to promote lasting educational reform. Start by addressing the “last in, first out” policy, which makes tenure the sole determinant of teacher layoffs. As applied in our public school system, this policy has proven to be inherently flawed—often allowing weak teachers to keep their jobs, and getting rid of effective teachers.

When budget cuts are necessary, firing good teachers and keeping bad ones is nothing short of a crime. We admit that it is hard to define a “good teacher” in a system as heterogeneous as our own, but we need to start developing standards for measuring the effectiveness of teachers that are more indicative of performance than simply how long a teacher has been in the system.

In New York, tenure is granted to almost all teachers who have fulfilled the required three years of teaching, with 97 percent of eligible teachers being granted tenure since 2007. This term, which represents having achieved “permanent status” within the DOE, proves nothing about a teacher’s capabilities, according to a 2008 study by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education. It reports that “the first two to three years of teaching do not predict anything about post-tenure performance,” because teachers don’t have to earn tenure, as they do in colleges, through the publication of academic materials. Instead, it is handed to them free of effort.

So, if “having tenure” doesn’t mean a teacher has achieved any tangible measurement of success, this arbitrary standard should not outweigh merit in determining which teachers stay and which are cut.

Teacher tenure is not popular among educators, or the general public. Thomas Kirsten’s 2006 study found that 91 percent of school board presidents either agreed or strongly agreed that tenure impedes the dismissal of underperforming teachers. Sixty percent also believed that tenure does not promote fair evaluations. Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett, in their groundbreaking article “Cracks in the Ivory Tower?,” found that 86 percent of education professors support “making it easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers—even if they are tenured.” Finally, the American public supports abolishing teacher tenure by a ratio of 5:2 according to an April 2011 study. Only teachers (the vast majority of whom are already tenured), support maintaining tenure laws—and polls show that this is only by a margin of 53 to 32 percent.

According to Public Agenda President Deborah Wadsworth, teacher tenure policies most severely harm low-income students because senior teachers prefer to work in high-income communities, where they face fewer students with behavioral issues, while younger teachers are more willing to accept the challenge of working with low-income students and students of color in order to help them succeed. Effectively, we are booting the teachers who are in highest demand. The result, she argues, is “a distribution of talent that is flawed and inequitable.”

Instead of using tenure as the basis for layoffs, we should have a system that uses performance as the primary factor in determining teacher layoffs.

Proposals for such a system already exist—most of which include a combination of standardized test scores, classroom observations, and degrees earned. (Let’s also note that while 600 districts in the state have signed off on such a proposal, New York City has not.) It’s a good start—but student evaluations, rarely taken into account, should also play a role in measuring teacher performance.

While critics of student evaluations claim that young children are not capable of assessing their own teachers, students, more so than any other observer, have an accurate portrayal of a teacher’s effectiveness and behavior in the classroom. We can avoid bias with targeted questions that ask students to evaluate their teachers under very specific standards. Harvard senior lecturer Ronald Ferguson found that when asked such targeted, specific questions “students provide accurate, helpful information on their teachers’ performance.” In fact, Ferguson demonstrated that these surveys were even more reliable than supervisors’ classroom observations.

That being said, eliminating tenure should not be an excuse for laying off older teachers simply because their salaries are more expensive for the state. In some cases, where teachers have performed equally well in their evaluations, tenure can be used as a differentiating factor. The point is hiring and maintaining quality teachers based on their merits as educators.

We don’t want to attack our teachers. We understand what an integral role they play in preparing us for our futures, but, the fact that only two teachers have been fired for incompetence in the last three years in the entire New York City system, that the city still refuses to implement statewide evaluation systems, and that teachers are not held accountable for performance, are damning facts the need to be addressed.

Keep your promise, Governor. Put the students first.

It’s not just us: the de-emphasis of the arts at Stuyvesant follows a nationwide trend especially prevalent during times of austerity when reduced funding often results in cuts to these subjects. Furthermore, the Common Core curriculum, which will be fully adopted by the State of New York this upcoming school year, directs attention away from creative endeavors and focuses on math and analytical writing. It determines that creative writing is less valuable than textual analysis, and doesn’t even include guidelines for classes like painting or ceramics.

What we fail to acknowledge both as a student body and as an educational system is the value of an arts education. In the specific case of Stuyvesant, it seems that those in charge have yet to realize that the arts can be used to strengthen our knowledge and skills in other fields. This is not an opportunity we can miss.

Offering 28 of the College Board’s 34 Advanced Placement courses, Stuyvesant prides itself on its extensive selection. But if we look at the six courses we do not provide, they include AP Art History and three Studio Art APs in Drawing, 2-D Design, and 3-D Design. Students who find they enjoy art history after Art Appreciation have no means of pursuing their interest with a more advanced class. Yet, other schools of similar caliber, notably the Bronx High School of Science, offer both AP Studio Art and AP Art History. More notably, unlike the band and chorus track that can replace Music Appreciation, there is no visual art track offered in place of Art Appreciation.

In the 2011- 2012 school year, 27 percent of New York City public high schools offered visual art tracks worth six or more credits. Given that one in four public high schools are offering this curriculum it would not be unreasonable for Stuyvesant to have one as well.

Granted, we do have some classes in the arts offered through 5 Techs, 10 Techs, and electives. But when 5 Techs and 10 Techs are phased out after next year, the options to pursue the arts in class will become limited to already oversubscribed electives.

“There are definitely not enough [art] classes,” art teacher Leslie Bernstein said.  After Art Appreciation, “ the options are few and far between.”

Classes no longer offered, such as Introduction to Sculpture, Opera as Drama, and Songwriting, while still listed on Stuyvesant’s website, serve only as reminders of the more extensive array of classes in the past.

For the Class of 2015 and beyond, sophomore year will lack creative classes entirely.

“Currently, because drafting is now moved out of the sophomore year, there are no creative choices during [that] year,” Bernstein said. “You might say a writing class is creative, but as far as hands-on learning, it doesn’t exist.”

The only required art classes for the Class of 2015 will be Art and Music Appreciation. Not only are these classes not hands-on, they fail to foster the appreciation for the arts that their titles claim they provide. Instead of instruments and paintbrushes, freshmen are subjected to lists of dates and names for memorization. Classes meant to foster a love of culture instead spawn widespread cheating and frustration.

To remedy this, Stuyvesant should begin offering AP Art History and at least one of the three AP Studio Arts to provide advanced classes. A visual track could also be implemented earlier in a student’s career here, structured in a similar way to the music program already in place. Students could take classes in woodworking, painting, photography, or other fields starting in freshman year, in the same way that students can already play in various bands freshman through senior year.

At the very least, required freshman arts classes should be reformed. Instead of pedantic courses that emphasize memorization, we need them to have a hands-on approach. Rather than lectures about paintings and the occasional project, why not have students draw and paint for themselves during every class period? The rigid curricula of these classes must be done away with, since they put pressure on teachers to get through centuries of art and music without ever meaningfully focusing on a single piece. A more relaxed curriculum would allow for quality rather than quantity. Ultimately, the ideal is that a student walks out of Art Appreciation having made genuine insights about the paintings he saw, even if he doesn’t know what medium Pieter Bruegel the Elder used (which he’ll forget immediately after he takes the final anyway).

But this issue isn’t confined to the school-day curriculum. There’s a disheartening lack of administrative enthusiasm in our after-school arts activities. In recent years, SING! and the Stuyvesant Theater Community (STC), the two biggest bastions for creativity at Stuyvesant, have become subject to stricter rules and limits. Preparation time for SING!, an event which represents the peak of school spirit and unity of the student body, has been getting shorter and shorter. In 2003, SING! was six weeks long, with the New Haven performance on April 9. In 2009, New Haven was on March 18. This year we have less time than ever, with a week of all-days cut due to the shortened mid-winter break—New Haven will be at the very end of February.

            SING! has evolved from a several-month production to one put on in less than a month in part because the administration’s concern that students will prioritize it over schoolwork. That, however, is our choice to make. Other after-school activities, such the speech and debate team, make huge demands on the time of its participants, and yet there hasn’t been a push to limit the time and resources they consume. Furthermore, if students had more time to prepare for SING!, rehearsals would be much shorter, leaving more time for us to complete schoolwork at night. Given more time, students would be less stressed and would perform better—both on the stage and in the classroom. This would also allow us to reap the benefits of the SING! experience, get the school excited about the arts, and provide us with a much needed creative outlet.

Furthermore, SING! suffers from censorship at the hands of the administration. Each year, soph-frosh, junior, and senior SING! scriptwriters are dismayed to find many of their lines and jokes cut from their scripts for inadequate reasons. Over time, this has resulted in a gradual dumbing-down of SING! since it is reduced to line after line of corny jokes, seemingly the only kind of humor and entertainment that can get past the administration’s tests for appropriateness.

“It changes the character. Students have less preparing time,” social studies teacher Matt Polazzo said of the administration’s tightened grip on SING!. “Shows are censored or controlled by the school. In general, it does seem that [SING!] has become a more controlled and more tame part of the culture.”

The STC, like SING!, has faced overzealous censorship. Many shows have had to omit important plot points, detracting from their overall quality—just recently, an important subplot about teenage pregnancy had to be cut from the STC’s production of “Grease” because it was deemed inappropriate for a high school audience.

Last year the administration shut down the annual STC One Acts festival, a series of four or five brief plays directed, performed, and usually written by students. A small group of students carried on the tradition outside of school, but it was not the same as it was within the school. Theater at Stuyvesant, an activity that fosters creativity and collaboration among students, has been egregiously stifled in recent years.

In tough economic times, fine arts are often the first to suffer when education costs need to be pared back. As budgets get tighter and cuts have to be made, it’s easy to fall into the mentality that, because arts are not technically as useful to society as math and science, they are worth less. This is a mindset that refuses to recognize certain realities. The arts fundamentally foster innovation, and creativity is not some insignificant ideal that needs to be put away when there’s an economy to build. It’s actually the opposite: ingenuity, now more than ever, is an economic necessity.

America’s average score on the standard Torrence test for creativity has been on a steady decline for the past 20 years, while a survey of the world’s top CEOs by IBM in 2012 found most business leaders saying that the most important quality for a business in today’s economy is creativity. Creativity is needed in business, science, and academia to encourage an innovation to thrive in the highly volatile economic world. A more immediate benefit of an arts education is a higher score on the SATs. The College Board’s research shows that students with four years of arts education outperform their classmates with only half a year by an average of 58 points on the verbal section and 38 points on the math section.

In addition, it’s not a coincidence that many of the most accomplished scientists and mathematicians have also had artistic hobbies and pursuits. This is because the arts not only foster creativity, but also offer students the ability to work with their hands, which, according to studies by renowned neurologist Frank Wilson, is an important aspect of psychological and intellectual development.

“I guess that’s the characteristic of our era, not just of our school: we’re moving away from [cultural] expressions,” Polazzo said. If this is true, Stuyvesant shouldn’t fit the mold of a contemporary school. Math-science school or not, a genuine arts education and experience must be nurtured at Stuy. A school that has bred so many Bio Olympiad and Intel finalists and Nobel laureates, and hopes to continue this tradition of creative achievement, can’t afford to let its students miss out on a genuine exploration of the arts.

The flexibility teachers enjoy in their grading works both for and against students. On one hand, it can put an emphasis on a student’s learning of material and efforts in class as opposed to just the numbers received from test, quizzes, homework, projects and essays. For some teachers, class participation and student improvement are crucial for high grades, while others grade solely based on test scores or even just the final exam. While it is justifiable (and in the student’s eyes, encouraged) to grade outside of the numbers, the fact that students of similar aptitude often recieve drastically different grades depending on their teachers indicates that the system has some serious flaws.

And while some of us benefit from this system, it also leaves a lot of room for unfair evaluation. On the Stuyvesant website, all of the departments have rubrics that break down how to compile a student’s grade. These rubrics are usually handed out by teachers at the beginning of a semester, and are put to use if a teacher makes a glaring mistake when calculating a student’s grade. “If there are any questions about a student’s grade we always check to see if the teacher followed the departmental grading policy,” Assistant Principal of Mathematics Maryann Ferrara said. Unfortunately, these rubrics can be very vague and open the door for unnecessary subjectivity.

Almost every department dedicates a certain percentage of a student’s grade to class participation. However, there are no guidelines on how to grade a student’s participation, and for some teachers this becomes a way to account for grade variance. While this can be good news for some students because it rewards effort and speaking up in class, it also leads to arbitrarily assigned grades, with this vaguely defined grade component a means of justifying them.  This is especially prominent in humanities courses, which tend to be largely discussion-based.

Another problem that arises, especially in departments like math and science where a huge deal of emphasis is placed solely on test grades, is the discrepancies in the difficulty of different teachers. It isn’t a secret to anyone that some teachers are easier than others in specific subject areas. Students will often try and rearrange their schedules to fill up their day with teachers they believe will be kind to their average. What creates these differences between teachers? Some teach rigorously, and thus give harder tests. However, their students are often better prepared for them. On the other end of the spectrum are the teachers who are more relaxed and give easy tests. There are also countless in-betweens, including the teacher who, unfortunately for students, does not teach the material that he or she tests and thus gives low grades.

These discrepancies have an array of consequences, in both the short and the long term. In the short term, students with the easier teachers get the best grades, regardless of how well they may be acquainted with the material. In such a case, a grade can barely be an indicator of aptitude. Those same students, along with the students who don’t learn and get bad grades, will be ill prepared for more advanced courses later on in their academic lives. However, their counterparts, who have suffered the offenses of low grades from tough teachers, might  have the advantage of being more familiar with the material. Because of this, how much students know when they come out of Stuyvesant largely depends on which teachers they have had; the point is clear: grades are not an accurate indicator of knowledge.

The fact is, every teacher is unique, and there is no way to ensure that every student gets the same experience from a class without forcing teachers to fundamentally change their teaching styles. However, there are ways to minimize the grade variance that results from this lack of uniformity. While departmental rubrics outlining how grades should be calculated undoubtedly exist, they are very rarely consulted and there seems to be little follow up to see if any one teacher’s grades differ drastically from the rest of the pack. We are advocating for a more pronounced open dialogue between teachers and their department heads regarding grading styles. The fact that some teachers have class averages in the high 90s others have averages in the low 80s and 70s needs to be addressed. Whether at monthly department meetings or one-on-one conferences between the teachers and their department heads, teachers need to be asked to explain the grades that they give. This would also ensure that department heads are aware of problems that may be occurring with certain teachers, and no teacher’s grading technique can simply slip through the cracks.

How else can we combat the varied grading styles that are so easily found at Stuyvesant? The idea of a Bell Curve distribution has been tossed around – in a class of 33, there may be one spot for a 99, five for a 92, and then 10 spots for 85s. Such a system provides a sliding scale, such that if the class average for a test is severely out of whack, all the grades can be adjusted appropriately. This would, in theory, provide a good indicator of how students are doing in comparison to their classmates, but there are foreseeable flaws in a system like this. While some students enjoy having this kind of benchmark, it may bog down and discourage others if they aren’t doing particularly well. Though this would prevent students from being harmed by a particularly hard teacher, it still wouldn’t prevent arbitrary grading within the class itself. In addition, creating extra emphasis on grade comparison only adds to the unhealthy Stuyvesant attitude of grade mongering and academic undercutting.

Another alternative would be to equalize particularly disparate grades by adjusting to a standardized class average – something like an 88. This is obviously advantageous to those who do poorly and whose grades will improve, but will prove unsavory to those whose grades may be shifted down. However, since these measures are that intend to ensure uniformity among various classes, and not within one class itself, this may not be such a poor idea. No longer will students with ostensibly unfair teachers be forced to suffer, and this also avoids pitting students against their peers. However, like the bell curve system, this also doesn’t prevent arbitrary grading within a class itself. Regardless, a student may still not acquire as much knowledge from a class they might with a different teacher.

Without reforming grading policies, online reporting could be utilized to ease ill feelings about grades. Through the use of online programs such as JupiterGrades, which is used at Bronx Science, or Engrade, which is already being utilized by some at Stuyvesant, teachers can ensure transparency. Teachers would input scores that students receive on homework, tests, and participation, and the program will do the rest. This will allow department heads to easily keep track of the grades that the teachers in their department give, and will facilitate even more communication within the department. Once again, teachers are more accountable for the grades they give because they have to justify them in an open record. The benefit for students is there too; they are able to see their grade at every point throughout the semester, and thus they will be less surprised about their grade at the end of the semester, curbing unnecessary anxiety.

There is no “magic bullet” that would single-handedly wipe out the problems that arise with the subjectivity of the grading system. However, a combination of some sort of curve that would standardize grades across the board and an online system that would allow students to understand exactly where their grades are coming from may help to wipe out some of the confusion and frustration. We all know Stuyvesant students can find ways to game the system to their advantage. But instead of finding ways to tiptoe around this problem, we should meet it head on and strive, hand in hand with teachers and department heads, to remedy this opaqueness. Maybe then we can embrace that teachers have different instruction styles with the knowledge that our grades won’t suffer because of them.

Racial diversity (or lack thereof) has always been an issue lingering in the shadows of the eight specialized high schools, particularly Stuyvesant. While we have an overwhelming majority of Asians making up 72 percent of our student body, the black and Latino students that comprise 70 percent of students in the city’s public school system comprise less than four percent of our own population.

The striking racial disparities at Stuyvesant and their consequences have been amplified since the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund’s (NAACP LDF) recently filed complaint. In emphasizing the lack of black and Latino students at the specialized high schools, the NAACP LDF takes issue with the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), grappling with this gateway into the long-valued meritocracy of Stuyvesant for its “discriminatory impact on African-American and Latino applicants,” NAACP LDF Director of the Education Practice Damon Hewitt said in an interview with BET.com.

This, however, isn’t the first time the SHSAT has been scrutinized by the law. Nor is it the first time the test has faced serious negative attention. Prior to the passage of the Hecht-Calandra Act in 1972, which mandated the SHSAT as the sole means of admissions to the specialized high schools, many had questioned the culturally biased nature of the exam—including numerous superintendents, The New York Times, and even then-Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education (DOE), Harvey Scribner.

The issue the LDF is trying to fix—that of limited racial diversity in the eight specialized high schools—is hard to blame solely on the SHSAT. And they seem to recognize that – the official complaint is that “the results [of the exam] are racially skewed.” More to blame are the cultural and educational deficiencies that plague many minority neighborhoods and effect potential Stuyvesant students at a grade much earlier than eighth, when the test is taken. Yet the LDF urges changes in the admissions process to the eight specialized high schools, changes more egalitarian and culturally embracing than the two-hour, 100-question exam nearly 30,000 students take each year. The LDF is accurate in saying that our system needs changes, but vague about how to make them. How, exactly, do we empower certain minorities and level the playing field for all New York City students while preserving the elite reputation of specialized schools?

In many elementary and intermediate schools in New York City, the public education system fails to instill academic fervor and curiosity – the same fervor that is necessary to thrive in a competitive environment like Stuyvesant’s. And it’s not just that these kids don’t have the instruction that would enable them to potentially score highly on the SHSAT – it’s the psychology behind seriously considering prepping for and attending a school such as ours. In minority neighborhoods, where so few people apply to elite schools and even fewer go on to attend them, it is easy to completely write us off the list. Making a drastic change to a new school environment, particularly one like Stuyvesant where there are so few familiar faces or even people of same race, could be a terrifying and alien prospect to many minority SHSAT-age students.

The sad truth is that many families in these neighborhoods are simply unaware of the specialized schools or the entrance exam. Many of us were fortunate enough to have parents who urged us along, idealizing Stuyvesant as the pinnacle of success and a pathway to a stellar college. Many other families, however, have other priorities that supersede the necessity for their children to have an elite education, barricading any awareness of the SHSAT or the Specialized High School Institute (SHSI), a free test prep program run by the city for middle school students with satisfactory performance on citywide exams and solid transcript grades. In many ways, it’s not just the educational system that needs to be re-educated – it’s the parents of many black and Latino families that, instead of investing in their children’s education, do not do enough to encourage high-level academic achievement.

While SPARK Coordinator Angel Colon and Parent Coordinator Harvey Blumm have made laudable efforts to reach out to minority-concentrated communities, the effort must expand. Organizations such as ARISTA and Big Sibs should continue the endeavor started by our school’s diversity clubs in SPARK and visit middle schools all around the city, whether it means talking to an auditorium filled with students or visiting classrooms.

But this isn’t all about parents and social pressures: the fact remains that to get into Stuyvesant one needs to beat out tens of thousands of other kids for the top spots by outscoring them on a multiple-choice test. Ask pretty much anyone in the halls how they spent the summers before seventh and eighth grades and you’ll hear stories about prep classes galore and grueling work to prepare for the SHSAT. Free prep courses need to be made more readily available – the SHSI is a great one, but traveling to prep locations isn’t an option for many families, and while many middle schools currently already have afterschool tutoring for the SHSAT, the teachers are often ineffective and read right from the back of a review book. We know that standardizing quality tutoring might not be the easiest thing to implement, but by making such resources readily accessible to the most neighborhoods begins to impart the message that everyone has a shot at a seat in one of the eight schools. And that’s a crucial message.

The root of our problem, and the complaint that has been raised against us, is that not enough minorities are taking the test, and those who do don’t score well enough to warrant a seat in one of the eight specialized schools. So – why don’t we make the test mandatory? It could be given like the state Math and Language exams students sit through starting in the fourth grade, and would make the presence of Stuyvesant and the other schools much more tangible and close to home for many potential students. Prestigious middle schools such as Delta on the Upper West Side already mandate the SHSAT, and they send dozens of students to specialized schools each year. If a student or her parents are against the test, it would be easy to opt out, but by assuming that the majority of students will sit the grueling two-and-a-half hour test it will become something that more people will actively prepare for.

That being said, simply giving the test to everyone doesn’t require minority students to study and won’t instantly provide huge changes in the specialized schools’ demographics. However, this is a practical, realistic step in the right direction – year after year, more students may see the opportunity being offered to them and take advantage of it.

More holistic changes to the admissions process, while possibly too radical and unrealistic to enact under the financial restraints of the Department of Education, would provide a more even playing field for all applicants by basing admission on many factors, instead of just on one test. These factors could include a review of middle school grades, extracurricular activities, and recommendations, giving the whole picture of a student.

But the whole point of the SHSAT is that it creates the ultimate meritocracy. It is blind to gender, race, past performance – only those who can succeed on a logic and math test get offered seats. Any other method of admission, insist opponents to a change, and schools such as Stuyvesant would lose their high standards. And to an extent, that’s true. It’s safe to say that we’re all proud of how selective our school is, and that we are truly the very few who were able to do well enough on an exam. However, this testing-only policy has produced certain types of students prominent at Stuyvesant – students who can answer any multiple choice question ever written but are unable to hold their own in a debate or write a strong essay, and students who might be naturally smart but unwilling to put in the hard work needed to excel. Combining the test with an interview and a review of the applicant’s middle school transcript might be a way to admit more well-rounded, but still exemplary, students. Once a student takes the test and receives a certain cut-off score, he could move onto a second round to be more closely vetted.  After the interviews, the group could be narrowed down to accepted students. This wouldn’t decrease selectivity – rather, by mirroring college admission systems, the integration of an interview and a transcript overview coupled with stellar SHSAT scores would only increase it.

We also have to remember that the current system also forms the composition of the city’s seven other specialized high schools, many of which are more diverse and have more minority students.  For example, according to its DOE report card, in the 2010-11 school year, 13 percent of the High School of American Studies at Lehman College’s students were black and 21 percent were Latino. The difference in performance on the SHSAT between getting into another specialized high school and getting into Stuyvesant isn’t very significant, and with some of the changes we discussed, more minority students can get over the hump of those points and get into Stuyvesant.

That being said, any change that is made to the system – regarding the admission process or something going even further back – is not going to be implemented immediately. Next year isn’t going to see a huge increase of minority students or diversity. This is something that will change by increments, and there will be people who complain that it isn’t enough. But change like this will make an impact over time, and will set a precedent each and every year for more people to take the test and consider Stuyvesant as a viable option for high school and their futures.

We’re competitive students driven by grades as a way to definitively affirm our academic standing. However, the recent cheating scandal, and subsequent articles in the wider media about the destructive cheating culture at Stuyvesant, indicate how the cutthroat nature here is destructive to many of the young minds that pass through our halls. The pressure-cooker that Stuyvesant can so easily become, with its emphasis on grades and success, is among the roots of our problems. The grading system is a huge factor in why cheating is so rampant, and it needs to be reformed.

As an Editorial Board, we discussed some possible new systems that could be implemented in place of our current system: number grades on a 1-100 score, with an overall average rounded to the nearest tenth. However, there are many proponents for the current system, so we’ve included it in our list of alternatives.

These aren’t going to get put in place tomorrow – rather, they are proposals to bring to the table, to help start a dialogue. We’ve done our best to assess both the pros and cons of each system in an unbiased manner, so now it’s up to you to decide for yourself which is best for our school.

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Current System

Stuyvesant has long been producing generations of successful students and professionals – clearly, we’re doing something right. The current grading system we use, which consists of number from one to 100 accurate to the nearest tenth, has shaped the rigorous culture that values accuracy and precision. That decimal grade provides clarity about rankings relative to our massive student body and relieves stress about where we stand, not so much in comparison to other students but in terms of our own progress.  Those extra decimal places motivate—giving an extra push to students who are satisfied to see their grade slowly inch up, and feel rewarded for the progress made, no matter how tiny, during each marking period. Furthermore, the stimulus offered by the decimal assimilates the student into the college experience and the real world, where students will face situations of overwhelming pressure and stress with relative ease because of the diligence and responsibility that have arisen from our current system of grading.

However, the very same attributes that define this system’s success can also act as a double edged sword, as some of us feel that our current grading methodology was a key factor in the cheating scandal that occurred last spring. The decimal places at the end of our grades induce a learning culture filled with pressure to be exceptional, imposed by ourselves but also by our peers, teachers, and parents. This pressure has introduced an inherent social hierarchy within the school based on grades; students just a tenth of a point below another are seen as intellectually inferior. This pressure and incentive within each student to make it to the top have caused the focus of school to shift from the sole purpose of learning to a fierce competition based on numbers. Thus, this system is alleged to have created the make-it-or-break-it, cutthroat society of Stuyvesant students, prompting those who can’t seem to reach their set bar of excellence to resort to the unfortunate depths of the cheating culture in order to achieve that 97 average cutoff perceived to be necessary to gain admission to an Ivy League.

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 Decimal Points

Yes, there’s no way to stop students from comparing GPAs–– it happens everywhere from middle schools to graduate programs. And without the abolition of grades altogether, competition will continue to persist at Stuyvesant. But it isn’t healthy to impose social hierarchy based on fractions of a point in a system that already strains students to the breaking point, especially when its only justifications are that it helps create a sense of motivation and gives us a taste of the cruel world that awaits us once we graduate. Sorry Stuyvesant, but we shouldn’t be sorting ourselves by tenths and we definitely shouldn’t derive pleasure from infinitesimally small numbers. Students are fully capable of determining their progress based on their own metrics for understanding–– that should be the goal of education, not working furiously to eek out another 0.1 to beat out a student or two.

Rounding the transcript GPAs sent to colleges to the nearest integer would allow us to take advantage of the few beneficial effects of an accurate average, such as a running measure of improvement, while stunting the cutthroat attitude that has so negatively shaped our school. Unfortunately, use of such a system would come with a distinct pitfall: it could have the effect of inflating grades or erasing gains if the final transcript average ended with a number above or below .5. However, the advantages of allowing a degree of imprecision would foster a student population less driven by decimal points and instead motivated by personal growth, and this benefit would far outweigh the already insignificant numbers we carry after the decimal point. Indeed, we are aware both students and college admission boards have calculators capable of determining exactly where a student stands–– to the nth decimal point we might add, but considering the latter is constantly distancing itself from a wholly numerical approach to decisions, and the former could use a break from an often dehumanizing high school experience, perhaps this is what is needed to help balance the friends-sleep-study triangle. After all, doesn’t leveling averages encourage more focus on the things that make us well, more than things?

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Another option would be to revert to the traditional A through F grading scale used in many high schools and universities. The Department of Education details recommended numerical equivalents for letter grades on a 1-100 scale, which would be used to calculate a numerical average if necessary. However, the school would be ultimately responsible for determining numerical conversions. This would relieve some of the stress on students to attain a certain number rather than a general status in the class – rather than worrying about obtaining a 95 over a 94, students would instead strive for an A, and hopefully divert their energy toward absorbing and understanding as much material as possible rather than regurgitating what is necessary to get a certain number grade. Students would not be able to impose social hierarchies based on fractions of points or even points themselves. Rather, they would have a clear understanding of how they are doing, which colleges would be able to understand easily.

This system could prove even more problematic than the current one in terms of the academic and social hierarchies of Stuyvesant. Under the current system, the averages of students fall somewhere on a spectrum, with many gradients between extremes. This system would potentially separate students into categories (A students versus B students versus C students) with the potential for labeling and profiling based on the grade category of the student. Because of the reasonably large numerical ranges for each letter grade, grade mobility would be especially difficult, and after a certain point students would be effectively locked into their letter grade. Additionally, as teachers convert numerical test grades and rubric scores into letter grades, arbitrary lines in the sand between grade categories could be created as a result. And while using grade categories rather than strict numbers would alleviate the pressure on a student solidly within grade categories, it would unfairly separate students on the edges. For most students, small differences in grades would be rendered irrelevant, but for the students constantly on the cusp of an 80, a 90, or a 97, they would mean a whole world of difference.

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What if the cause of the cheating were removed? What if students no longer received numerical grades? What if school became entirely about progress rather than a parochial system of assigning a symbol to indicate human being’s intellectual worth? Instead of using grades, teachers would write a paragraph on each student, adding more information each term, so that by the end of the term, a student and his parents would have a snapshot of his performance. Something similar to this system is utilized quite successfully in St. Anne’s High School, a small private school in Brooklyn. Obviously, adapting something like this to a school as large as Stuyvesant has its challenges, but the system has many benefits.

Teachers would talk about how the student acted in class. Did he participate? How conscientious was he on his homework? Did he demonstrate a strong understanding of the material? These broad categories that teachers currently assign numbers to would become a paragraph that highlighted a student’s strengths and weaknesses. This would be a way to hold teachers responsible for getting to know their students, addressing one of the common complaints that our school in an impersonal one.

Tests would be different. Instead of having a number in a red circle at the top of the page, a teacher would highlight student’s mistakes without an ultimate grade. Tests would serve their original purpose, to inform the teacher of the student’s process. In their writing, teachers would discuss how students performed on tests – not in terms of numbers and points, but in terms of truly understanding the material. A student could try to work out his grade on the exam by calculating percentages, but he would find that it wouldn’t matter since that number would have no impact on what came out in the paragraph.

By removing grades, students would learn for learning’s sake, not just to get a good grade. Kids would push themselves to do better because they would know that they would learn more, not because they felt compelled to get a higher grade than their neighbor in math class. Instead of competing against each other, students would strive to do better in class. If they slacked off, it would be reflected in the paragraph. By instituting paragraphs, Stuyvesant would reinstall a passion in learning, something that seems to have diminished in this age of testing.

A total lack of grading may seem scary, especially when it comes to looking at colleges. With nothing but prose to recount four years of hard work, it’s easy to say that Harvard may be skeptical when comparing an essay to a row of straight 98s from another school. However, students from St. Annes have been getting into phenomenal colleges on this system, and admissions officers dealing with Stuyvesant students need merely to be debriefed on the change of system and evaluate the written record without the metric of a GPA or individual grades. There are hundreds of different grading methods that schools from all over the country, and admissions personnel are well equipped to handle all of them and adapt to new ones, as well.

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A change in the grading system may be exactly what Stuyvesant needs to fix our number-obsessed culture. However, simply presenting scores in a different way, while helping to level the playing field between students with similar numbers, does only a little to compensate for different teachers’ grading styles – and this is a big problem, as well. Grading discrepancy is rampant. Departments don’t hold their staff to standardized grading rubrics, and teachers grade similar topics in vastly different manners.

As an Editorial Board, we tried to be careful and detailed in putting these different techniques together. While the St. Anne-esque technique may be closer to a perfect system for some of our more holistically-minded students, there is a significant argument to be made for the current one, as well as the two more moderate ones in between. We don’t know which system is best; we just know something has to change. Let the debate begin.