It’s been a week since Middletown North finished taking its first quarterly exams for the new school year and the conversations around the school are booming with rumors about these exams and the impact they will have on student’s grades.
A week before the start of the first quarterly, the Board of Education meeting held on October 23, 2013 focused largely on quarterlies and attempted to find a permanent solution and put an end to all of the rumors floating around the Middletown High Schools.
It had been decided at this meeting that the exams would be counted as a separate marking period grade, just like midterms and finals in previous school years. Each individual marking period will now count as twenty percent for a student’s final grade, with the remaining twenty percent being the grades averaged from the four quarterlies.
Each individual exam will now only count as only five percent of the total fifth marking period grade, instead of being averaged into a student’s regular marking period grade.
Sophia D’Alessandro had this to say on this change, “I think it’s at least a little bit better than influencing our marking period grades, however I still wish we had midterms and finals back. I miss going home at twelve o’ clock and having that few extra hours to study for my exams.”
Another issue was the discussion of what to do with AP students around the third marking period. Most AP students will be preparing for their AP exams around the same time they will be preparing for their third quarterly.
With this dilemma, many students would feel overwhelmed at the idea of taking two massive exams within possibly days or a few weeks of each other. Middletown North proposed that AP students are exempt from the third quarterly of the year so they will have additional time to study for their AP exams.
With this suggestion, Middletown South also proposed that AP students and seniors with an A average in their class are exempt from the final quarterly with teacher permission. This proposal was passed for the seniors with an A averages only, the final decision on whether to exempt AP students is still undecided.
However, many of these suggestions have not been approved yet and the Board of Education will be discussing quarterlies again at their next meeting on December 18th.
