High schools suspend midterms, finals
Move could become permanent as district officials weigh the benefits and downside
“Kids are still going to take summative assessments. You still have to learn how to study. I just think that there are better ways to assess students against the standards.” Amy Beldotti, associate superintendent
STAMFORD — City high schools will not be holding midterm and final exams this school year, and the long-standing practice of end-of-semester assessments may never return in Stamford.
The tests were suspended this year not because of COVID-19, but rather because of an ongoing curriculum audit of how the school district handles teaching and learning.
Amy Beldotti, associate superintendent for teaching and learning, said the old way of administering midterms and finals has plenty of drawbacks. For starters, she said, Stamford teachers often spend three or four days helping students prepare for the exams, and the tests themselves take up four school days.
That means a high school student can take seven cumulative exams in four days, a heavy lift for many.
Beldotti said teachers also lose a lot of instructional time preparing for and administering the assessments; suspending the tests will bring back the lost in-class teaching time.
But that doesn’t mean students won’t be taking summative tests, Beldotti said. Teachers will still be conducting tests and quizzes throughout the year. In fact, Beldotti said she would like to move to a model of more assessments for students in place
of the one-and-done midterms and finals, which can often have an outsized impact on a student’s final grade.
In the past, midterms and finals combined to represent 20 percent of a student’s grade at the end of the school year.
“Kids are still going to take summative assessments,” she said. “You still have to learn how to study. I just think that there are better ways to assess students against the standards.”
No decision has been made on midterms and finals beyond this school year, but the curriculum audit will likely dictate how the district moves forward, she said.
Removing the tests isn’t unheard of. The Danbury school district made the move to cut midterms and finals seven years ago for much of the same reasons Stamford is considering it.
Danbury schools Superintendent Kevin Walston did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move to suspend midterms and finals in Stamford came from building administrators at the three high schools, as well as other district administrators, according to the weekly message written by Superintendent Tamu Lucero.
The superintendent said families will be able to learn more about the district’s decision to scrap midterms and finals this year at open house on Sept. 23.
Gina Calabrese, the mother of a high school student, said she wants to hear more details about the policy change, but is skeptical about the move.
“I’m curious to hear more about the reasons and how students will now be assessed for their command of the material they’re learning in high school,” she said. “I’m concerned that our students will not be adequately prepared for college without midterms and finals.”
Beldotti said the final exam system often does not reflect a student’s understanding of subject matter and encourages last-minute cramming. The exams themselves, she said, are commonly multiple choice, a format that does not necessarily test deep understanding of a topic.
The importance of the exams on final grades also contribute to stress for students and teachers, Beldotti said.
Calabrese pushed back on that.
“I’m all for wellness, but our kids have to learn resiliency,” Calabrese said, later adding, “There are some students that need to learn how to handle stress.”
Once the tests are over, students rarely get feedback, another drawback according to Beldotti. Students generally just receive a final grade and move on, without finding out what they got wrong or how to improve.
Beldotti would like to see a move to more presentation and project-based learning. She said teaching students how to write papers and give presentations will better prepare them for the real world, as opposed to the one-and-done test environment.
“This is really about moving toward something that is more going to prepare our children for college and career,” she said.
Some parents and community members have taken to social media to criticize the district’s decision.
Mona Mitri, who runs a tutoring service in Stamford called Tutor Me SOS, said the move to eliminate midterms and finals is wrongheaded.
She found out about it when students she tutors said they received syllabuses from teachers that said the summative assessments won’t take place this year.
“This is how you prepare students for college,” she said. “You have to prep students to take midterms and finals.”
She said one of the most common stories she hears from Stamford parents is that their child does well in class all year but struggles in the midterm or final. Mitri said midterms and finals are meant to test the comprehension of any material, and better prepares students for complex tests in college.
“I do believe it’s a big mistake eliminating it,” she said.
Robert Katchko, the father of a high school student, said taking away the end-of-semester tests will set students up for failure at the college level.
“I doesn’t help the kids get ready for college,” he said.
Once news got out on social media about the exams being suspended, members of the Board of Education were also informed through an email communication from district administrators explaining the rationale for the decision.
Member Jackie Pioli asked that it be added to a future meeting of the board’s Teaching and Learning Committee.
She wrote back to the board and central office officials, stating, “Removing a summative assessment when it evaluates how much someone has learned throughout a course is not common practice.”
Pioli wrote that removing the assessments takes away accountability for the district and impacts academic rigor.
“Once again we are lowering the bar,” she wrote.
Some parents were also upset that they only learned about the policy shift through social media, not from the schools themselves. For many, it mirrored the experience this spring when parents discovered a handful of AP classes had been eliminated at Stamford High School in an email only sent to students.
“Parents are not being told what’s happening in their children’s education,” Calabrese said.
She added, “I’m all for innovative policies and new approaches and ways to make students more engaged in learning. It’s just that we haven’t heard the rationale for this. And some of us are a little skeptical of what the motivations are.”
Beldotti said the plan was always to present the move away from midterms and finals at the open house at the end of the month. But when teachers handed out syllabuses last week, students noticed that midterms and finals were not present. That information got to parents, who took to social media to complain.
In response to some parents who complained that educational rigor at the high schools would be adversely affected by suspending midterms and finals, Beldotti said that wasn’t the case.
“I think what’s important really is that this is not a free pass to graduation,” she said. “We’re not trying to make things easier for kids.”