Setting New Standards

At the beginning of each school year, the most common topic of conversation at Stuyvesant is “Who are your teachers?” This is followed by either a groan at the excruciating months to come or a silent “thank you” to the computer algorithm that granted the student good fortune in the form of an easy 95.

At Stuyvesant, grades are partial because they depend largely on your teacher and often reflect luck rather than merit. While there are always good and bad teachers, one thing that can be changed is the standardization of the difficulty of classes by assistant principals at Stuyvesant.

Colleges don’t take the teacher of a class into consideration, nor is it possible to translate teacher difficulty into a numerical curve on the student’s average. Admissions officers can’t keep tabs on every teacher at a school, especially with the tens of thousands of students from hundreds of schools who apply for elite U.S. colleges each year. Since colleges are easily deceived by an unrealistic GPA from an easy course and teacher, and thus might unfairly reject students who simply got the short end of the stick, introducing set, written standards for grading and keeping exam difficulty constant will give colleges a more truthful view of students’ academic achievement.

Often, students with comparatively harsh graders lack the same confidence of their higher scoring peers. Stuyvesant offers a wealth of advanced classes, but there’s a fine line between a class being difficult yet fair and totally impossible. Classes that are unreasonably difficult can take a toll on student confidence in their academic ability, causing students to do worse on schoolwork and tests.

A study by Open Colleges indicated that “confidence increases from beginning to end in a course, provided the students perform adequately.” After being repeatedly unsuccessful in a class, there is less incentive to try harder as each attempt appears more and more futile. Sophomore Ilona Khimey stated, “I get very discouraged when a teacher doesn’t reward my effort at all, and when I see friends trying two times less doing 10 points better.”

Alternatively, the institution of standards maximizes learning, because standards are written by authorities with educational experience who understand what information will help students in the long run.

Standardization is achievable by keeping exam difficulty constant throughout all classes of a subject and creating Common Core-like guidelines to communicate to students, parents, and staff what students should and should not be learning. The final exam should be built upon these standards to fairly measure the skill of the student and teacher. If many students for a certain teacher score poorly on the final exam, then it is a clear indicator that the teacher should begin shaping his or her curriculum to fit the standards better.

For instance, if all of a teacher’s students failed the history final, while students with other teachers did well, the scores would reflect more on that specific teacher than his students, creating a system of enforcement. This way, there are no “tough” teachers and no “easy” teachers; everyone stays on the same playing field, learning generally the same material, making college admissions much more fair, program changes less hectic, and giving students an easier time overall.

This in no way limits a teacher’s creative autonomy in terms of how they want to teach the material. If a teacher’s job is to introduce students to a set curriculum, this should be done regardless of personal teaching style. They’re still able to instruct their classes however they want and add as much information as they deem necessary, just as long as they still teach the required material.

Making the curriculum clear and consistent for every teacher will also eliminate superfluous information that teachers often throw into their curriculum because of personal preferences, saving time and effort. If the student isn’t learning what the standards say he or she should be learning, it’s easy for the teacher to be alerted, because standards are set in stone.

Right now, success in Stuyvesant can’t be attributed to solely intelligence. Luck is arguably just as important in maintaining a high GPA. While conflating natural abilities with the numbers on our transcript is a mistake most students make, the stress of maintaining good grades makes it hard to evaluate ourselves otherwise. Standardizing curriculums would bridge the gap between fairness and the ability to succeed, leveling the playing field once and for all.