With the first month of school nearly completed, Nashua North is still getting used to the plethora of changes that occurred within the school over the summer.

These changes include new teachers, new assistant principals, a freshman mentorship program, and the
competency-based grading system.

The competency-based grading system was piloted last school year and has now taken over standards-based grading, the traditional grading system. The basis of competencies is to grade students on a scale of 1-4 on how well they perform specific tasks on an assignment.

Assignments are separated into two major categories: formative and summative. Formative assessments consist of worksheets, homework, and other practice work being a very small percent of your overall grade. Summative Assessments are your tests, quizzes, projects, and presentations these make up 85-95 percent of your total grade.

Another policy in this system is not allowing extra-credit work but making it so that every assignment could be made up if it was done poorly the first time. It seems straightforward but has caused worry for many students.

Senior Rory O’Neil designed a petition addressing the widespread fear that seniors specifically were feeling with the new system. Students had similar experiences of competencies being interpreted differently by each teacher, having the real definition and requirements of grades be unclear, and the general inaccuracy of four numbers being converted to letters, which almost always resulted in the lowering of student grades by a whole letter – and these are just a few of the problems found.

The most worrying effect of the new system is how it has the potential to affect college acceptance, as a drastic drop in grades that were inaccurately recorded looks like a warning sign to colleges.

The problem with competencies is not their basis and structure, but the way they are being currently applied. The system is widely fractured and misunderstood by teachers and students, making the current grades a lot of students are getting a misrepresentation of their actual knowledge.

This becomes a large problem – and genuine fear for many students – due to the proximity of college deadlines.

It is vital that the true design and purpose of the system is explained and understood in detail by all of the teachers, who then can make their expectations clear to students, so that this system can stop being a guessing game and actually help students grow.

Hanzla Sheikh is a senior at Nashua High School North.