A student walks into class during the final block of the day. They have already completed two assessments and are mentally drained. As they arrive, their teacher announces that they have a pop assessment, but because it is technically a “quest” and not a test, the student cannot postpone it. The Legislature is aiming to solve this problem, by adding to already implemented legislation that allows students to delay their assessment if they have three total assessments in a day.
Three students and two teachers on Legislature are currently drafting a bill called the Assessment Reform Bill, aiming to clearly define what constitutes an assessment. The students writing the bill aim to outlaw “pop assessments,” with mixed responses from teachers on the committee.
Co-chair of Legislature and senior Eric Bardon, who is helping to draft it, said the bill introduces clear language for what constitutes an assessment. Bardon said that it will redefine an assessment to mean any in-class graded assessment that would require additional preparation beyond nightly homework.
Students can delay a test but not a quiz. There is an existing cap of three tests per day across all subjects, but Bardon said that it can be a struggle to clearly define what an assessment is.
“The current language is a little ambiguous. Students will often complain that their teacher created a ‘quest,’ which is a quiz and a test, and the teacher claims this does not count towards one of the three assessments. The dispute here has been the inconsistency in what we consider an assessment,” Bardon said.
The other students working on the bill also emphasize their intention to outlaw “pop assessments,” which teachers have taken issue with.
“This bill is also working on the importance of notice before exams. Essentially, a cap on assessments is that one knows ahead of time so that they can communicate with a teacher that they want to delay the assessment. If they are given a ‘pop assessment,’ where they are unaware of the assessment beforehand, this goes against the spirit of the bill,” Bardon said.
Student Council member and sophomore Justin Kim said that there are counterarguments from some in favor of spontaneous testing.
“The current opposition to the bill is about pop quizzes being necessary for student development. Basically, if you aren’t prepared to take a test every single day in your class, you’re taking too many difficult classes,” Kim said.
Despite being in favor of defining an assessment as any in class assignment which has required knowledge beyond the last night’s homework, one critic of the intended ban on “pop assessments” is Adam Fried.
“We differ in figuring out what should count as a major assessment, or even more on what would count as a major assessment,” Fried said.
Fried said that the ending of “pop assessments” would encompass too wide a net of assessments, emphasizing the difference between a pop assessment that covers a few days of work and one that covers an entire unit.
“There’s a lot of gray area between saying something you have to prepare more than a day for or something that goes back more than just one day versus something that goes back for three weeks,” Fried said. “There’s a lot of room in there for what an assessment could be. I look at it more in terms of how long an assessment would take, how many points it’s worth, things like that, as opposed to when the material was originally learned.”
Regardless of what happens with the Assessment Reform Bill, Fried said that students have options if they feel they have been treated unfairly.
“If a student feels that their teacher is doing something unfair, they should talk to their teacher,” Fried said. “Then, they can always talk to the curriculum coordinator for that department and address their concerns that way.”
