The end of the quarter is an incredibly stressful time for students. Working to keep grades up or trying to improve borderline grades is common among most. Rather than pointing out this commonality, we want to showcase a disparity that is completely unfair to students: students live their lives by due dates and deadlines. The only deadlines teachers must meet are at the end of the quarter before closing their gradebooks. Why is it that students can be left awaiting their grade until the absolute end of the quarter on assignments that they completed numerous weeks prior?
Throughout the duration of the marking period, students must keep up with their seven classes a day, completing assignments of various lengths and difficulty by their given due dates. Spending late nights preparing for huge unit tests or finishing heavily weighted assignments, is something that we and many of our peers experience. We put in the effort to turn in our best work when it is due, but are often left waiting until the end of the quarter to see what our grades are.
We must be kept up to date on what our grades are in our classes. Teachers must be given a deadline for when they have to grade certain assignments. An assignment should not go ungraded for an entire quarter, when by that time due dates for multiple other assignments have long passed. Teachers give various opportunities towards the end of the quarter to redo assignments and boost grades, but how will students know whether or not they should put immense effort into redoing assignments if they have no idea what their current grade really is?
With holes in the gradebook and many unknowns, designating time to redoing assignments also causes more stress for students with so many other classest. This compels students to blindly attempt to save a grade that may not actually need saving, while also maintaining the rest of their grades.
For seniors, the additional stress of college applications have been present for a long while now. With the recent and hugely important Nov. 1 deadline recently passing,the focus has been shifted completely towards getting those apps done.
As seniors are required to send in mid-year reports to most of the schools that they apply to, they still have to find time to focus on grades. This has meant that seniors have to endure huge loads of stress that could easily be avoided if teachers graded assignments with more time sensitivity. For instance, recently we awaited grades on numerous assignments that had been completed over 2 weeks. We didn’t know what our final grades were until our teachers decided to finally enter our grades on Nov. 3, one day before the closing of the gradebook. We found ourselves sitting around worrying about what our grades would be, while we should have been worrying about college applications.
When reading this, a thought that could surface is the fact that teachers have hundreds of assignments to grade, while students have just a few to complete. We acknowledge that teachers have a large amount of assignments to grade, but they do have answer keys and rubrics to help speed up the process. As such, we argue that many teachers do not take into account the workload from our other six classes when giving us assignments. We struggle to understand why we should sympathize when we aren’t given that luxury. Teachers should be grading assignments in a timely manner and deadlines must be set for both teachers and students.
