BENTONVILLE -- End-of-semester tests -- along with a policy permiting students to skip them based on effort and attendance -- are back at Bentonville High School.
The School Board voted unanimously Monday in favor of Principal Jack Loyd's recommendation to reinstate semester exams and exam exemptions after the high school tried going one year without them.
Enrollment
Bentonville High School’s enrollment on Tuesday, the first day of school, was 4,471. There were 4,334 students in class Tuesday, an attendance rate of 96.9 percent, according to Principal Jack Loyd. The school has the largest enrollment of any school in the state. Enrollment likely will decline by several hundred students next year with the opening of West High School in Centerton.
Source: Staff report
Loyd said absenteeism was up 118 percent last school year from the 2013-14 school year, the last time semester exams and exemptions were offered. Grades also suffered last year; the percentage of A's and B's dropped while the percentage of C's and D's increased, Loyd said.
"The only thing of significance we changed was the exemption policy," Loyd said.
Under the policy, a final test will be given in each class during the last three days of the semester covering material from the entire semester. Students may skip the final test for a particular class if they have four or fewer absences and no zeroes on any assignments or previous tests in that class.
The policy differs slightly from what the school had before. Instead of the no-zeroes rule, students had to have at least a 75 percent grade to qualify for an exemption in a class.
Loyd said he talked to the student council last spring about reinstating exemptions. The council was "overwhelmingly" in favor of the proposal, he said. Staff members also supported it.
Bentonville High regularly compares itself to 19 peer schools across the nation; of those schools, 11 offer exemptions and eight do not, Loyd said.
The high school had offered exemptions for at least 15 years before opting to let teachers decide how and when to test their students during the 2014-15 school year. A cumulative exam could still be given, but it didn't have to be locked into the last three days of the semester.
Chad Scott, who was principal at the time, told the board in April 2014 semester exams tend to punish those students who are already struggling, while the best students didn't even have to take the exams.
Scott also said research has shown more frequent assessments on less material is a better practice than doing a cumulative assessment of much more material. Eliminating final exams also allows teachers to devote more time to instruction that is typically used to review for those exams, he said.
Scott left Bentonville High earlier this year to become principal at Fayetteville High School. Loyd was named the new principal in May.
Travis Riggs, board president, asked Loyd if re-instituting exemptions was really about lessening the work load on teachers. He wondered why the school wouldn't return to demanding students score at least a 75 percent in a class to earn an exemption.
"That makes me think it has to do with the administrative burden of grading tests, scoring tests, posting test scores, getting it all done," Riggs said.
Loyd acknowledged Riggs had a point, but added teachers would still have to work to verify whether each student qualifies for an exemption.
He added the staff struggled with whether to mandate students attain a certain grade threshold to qualify for exemptions.
"We made it a vote of the staff," Loyd said.
Board member Grant Lightle asked if the staff considered offering any other kinds of incentives to students for attendance.
They did, Loyd said, but the incentive had to be something that cost the school little or nothing.
"An incentive has to be a pretty good-sized deal. It has to be a game changer," he said.
Lightle said when he supported getting rid of exemptions, he did so because he thought kids preparing for college needed the experience of taking cumulative exams.
"I don't see the benefit to telling a kid who's got a 68 or 69 percent you have to take the test, and by the way that might drop you down to a D-minus or an F," Lightle said. "The real benefit is for the kids who need to get their heads around large amounts of information."
Any student who qualifies for an exemption may still take an end-of-semester test, but the score would count only if it ends up raising that student's overall grade.
Shahul Alam, a senior, said he thinks the school is making the right move on exemptions. The school offered exemptions during his freshman and sophomore years. They made the end of each semester much less stressful, he said.
"It let you focus more on those classes you really had to focus on," Alam said. "Then last year you had to study for finals for every single test, even if you had a good grade. That made it a lot harder."
Alam said he thinks the new policy will have a big positive effect on the attendance rate.
"I'm sure this will be a change in the right direction," he said.
NW News on 08/20/2015