A Report to Improve Testing Policies

We conducted research to find out what students think about Franklin’s testing policies and how to improve them.

We conducted a survey and collected feedback from students to help us formulate policy improvements and identify which polices are currently working well. Some advantages of these changes include: allowing students to be better prepared for assessments, giving students more control over their final grade, better regulation of the current policies.

If grades are important, having good grading policies is critical

The current testing policies at Franklin don't allow students to have much control over their final grades.

This mainly comes from the current policies on exams. Exams are currently weighed at 25%, which means that even if you worked hard all semester this assessment still has the power to tank your grade. 

This thought causes a lot of stress among students. Not only is the student's control limited by the current testing policies, but these policies aren't being reinforced among the teachers.

There have been many instances where teachers have broken a policy, but there was no real way to hold them accountable. Our new reformed policies address these issues and would benefit both the students and teachers by giving the student more control, providing more regulation, and removing policies that are unfair/ unnecessary. 

What students are saying

After conducting our survey, we found that many students believe that the current testing policies are overwhelmed and should be changed.

To gather some feedback on this topic, we published our survey in the school's daily newsletter. Our survey sample represents about 14% of the student body.

About 75% of students thought that exams should be worth less than 25% of their final grade. 82% of students expressed that exams have negatively affected their overall grade in a class. When asked about the testing policies that students would want to change, many students shared that they wanted teachers to stop assigning in-class summatives on C-Days. Summative assessments usually take a while to complete, which is frustrating when classes are only 40 minutes long.

Furthermore, many students have also stated that their teachers aren't giving them a full week's notice, which is required in the current policy. This means that students aren't able to properly prepare for summative assignments and will therefore have a weaker performance that may not be representative of their actual abilities.

Trade-offs

Difficult for teachers to adjust to new testing policies 

The reporting form can cause more work for the administration to keep track of. 

Benefits

We are not completely changing the current testing policies, we are only reforming a few of them that have caused the most trouble. 

The administration already has to deal with unhappy emails from students about this topic, but this is a more organized way for the administration to keep track of reports of teachers breaking the testing policies. 

Students will have more control over their final grades because they will get to choose how much their exams are worth. 

Unfair and unnecessary policies will be removed for the students' and teachers' benefit.