Under the new reassessment policy, students must have all of their work submitted, demonstrate an effort on the first test, and score below an 83 percent to qualify for a retake.

A new reassessment policy was constructed by a committee of staff members, administration, and teachers to create a consistent policy throughout the school. The policy took about six months to develop and was created to eliminate confusion for students and teachers.

“We wanted to have a consistent policy throughout the school,” assistant Principal Peter Kownacki said. “We found that each curriculum team, each department had a slightly different policy and it was hard for students to understand the differences of each policies, like you had to do a certain set of things in English class and different set of things in math and different set of things in science.”

The staff members all consented to an 83 percent as the maximum score a student can receive on a retake.

“The theory is that if you know material, it’s called ‘mastering the content,’ you score a certain percentage on the test,” Kownacki said. “So the thought was that the process should be all about learning instead of grades so if you have already achieved what the staff thinks as ‘mastering the content,’ then there is no need to retake the test because you’ve already achieved that material and should be focusing on the new material.”

The policy allows students to focus on new materials instead of getting caught up in a cycle of having to remediate the previous content. Almost all the teachers believe that this will improve student’s study skills.

“I think one of the big benefits of it is that students are going to end up taking ownership of the studying process,” Kownacki said. “Some other big benefits are ownership of the learning process instead of getting caught up in this backward cycle of retesting and what not. So always looking forward, taking ownership, and learning some study skills to be able to prepare for the first exams.”

As of now, the school received no negative responses about the policy from students. Therefore, the school believes that the policy is supported by teachers and students.

“So far, I have heard no negative comments from students,” Kownacki said. “And I think that’s partially because the staff is doing a good job explaining why the policy is put into place. The staff really supports it and they’re making their instruction in line with what the reassessment policy is.”