Throughout the past couple of years, Southeast Polk has seen quite a few changes to policy, highlighted especially by the debate over cell phones in school. Another change that was heavily debated within the past couple of years was the general switch to a standards reference grading system for all courses. However, one change within these last four years hasn’t brought as much attention.

For the 2023-2024 school year, some classes switched from doing the newest iteration of finals, to cumulative exams. If you’re not a senior this year, then you probably aren’t familiar at all with how these assessments worked. Essentially, every class had some sort of end of the semester assessment. With this, students could choose two courses to opt-out of for the semester assessments. The student could still take the final assessments for those courses, they just couldn’t hurt their grade.

The only caveat is that if you took a year-long course, then you couldn’t opt out of both semester finals for that class. You were also only required to be at school during times you had finals. If you didn’t have finals for a period, it essentially acted as a study hall release that day.

Now however, many classes have cumulative exams, which you can’t opt out of. This sometimes makes it difficult, because you not only have to study for tests nearing the end of the semester, but also cumulatives to study for, which can put a lot on students’ plates, especially those taking advanced classes. The upside though is that students get two days for reassessments. Those who are struggling with classes get the option to revise and reassess struggle areas, and those who are proficient in classes get a break before the start of the second semester.

Both systems have their upsides, and it all comes down to preference. It’s interesting though to reflect on the changes our school has made, both big and small.