Student Council and Administrators Launch Assessment Calendar

On October 1st, Interim Dean of Academics Liz Solis and Student Council Co-President Athena Muhammad ‘22 launched an Upper School assessment calendar. 

During their campaign last spring, Muhammad and fellow Co-President Caroline Gong ‘22 proposed creating a transparent test calendar available to students and teachers alike. Gong is addressing student wellness while Muhammad is focusing on teacher-student communication during their tenure. 

Muhammad has coordinated with various teachers since the start of the school year. Since the test calendar is digital, she has also collaborated with the Director of the Technology Department, Dave Levin. After ample planning and discussions with various teachers, Levin, Muhammad, and Solis released a Google Calendar that students can add to their Google account. 

Upper School teachers will submit information about their assessments for review, such as the type of test and date, the content area, and grade levels impacted. To better pace their courses, teachers are encouraged to refer to the calendar to see the number of assessments in a given week. 

Some students have found this calendar quite helpful. An anonymous junior checks the calendar on a regular basis. Because they struggle with pacing their study schedule, they find that the calendar “helps [them] keep track of when [their] tests are… so that [they] can plan ahead of time.”  However, another junior does not use the test calendar, as they find it somewhat confusing to navigate the different grade-level tests on the document. 

As to why the calendar includes the entire Upper School, Muhammad explains that she is taking both faculty and student opinions into account. She wants to consolidate all the information in one spot, the Google Calendar, to reduce unnecessary workload for teachers and incentivize them into updating the calendar consistently. 

Currently, Muhammad is working on uploading the assessment calendar onto HRSConnect. Right now though, students can access the calendar by finding Solis’ October 1st email, and can reach out to Muhammad or Gong with any feedback or questions. Muhammad hopes that this new resource can “make a more beneficial student experience and [allow students to] spend more time going in-depth on assignments rather than spreading themselves out too thin.”