On Feb. 8, the Academic Transparency Proposal co-sponsored by senior Russell Wohland sophomore Tyler Hac*k was successfully passed in Executive Committee. Discussions of the proposal began Dec. 10 and it has since been the primary topic of discussion at the Committee’s weekly meeting. Although each of the proposal’s three subsections passed, the Academic Committee, which consists of department heads and senior administrators, will now carefully review the document and make a final vote to determine if the proposal can be implemented into school policy.

The first subsection of the bill calls for a grading rubric to be present in each class throughout the Upper School, beginning in the 2021-2022 school year. The passing of this section would require every teacher to submit a grading rubric to the students in their class during the first week of each semester. 

Subsection two of the proposal requires that the Missed Homework Assignment Tracker on the Learning Management System (LMS) be turned on for all students starting at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year. In previous years, teachers have been able to activate this feature, but it has not been mandatory. As outlined in the proposal, this specific feature on the LMS will notify students if they miss an assignment during the week, discounting homework that is not checked for completion. Should teachers prefer another method to alert students of this missed assignment, subsection two allows them the freedom to do so.

The third subsection of the proposal details that all teachers return major assessments to students within three weeks or 15 school days, starting in the 2021-2022 school year. With the specificity of 15 school days, teachers would be given more than three weeks should there be a long weekend or extended break. With the passing of this section, such a rule would also be permanently added to the faculty handbook. Additionally, reminders about this return policy will be given to students at the end of each semester so that they can give productive feedback in the semester Course Feedback forms.

*Note: Russell Wohl is a Tower columnist and Tyler Hack is a Tower blogger. As such, they did not participate in writing this article.