With class registration week always being a stressful time, the implementation of placement tests provided a new source of worry this year. 

With such a drastic change to the registration system, which served as a contentious modification to the previous waiver system, The Gibbons Globe spoke with Nancy Barkan, Assistant Head of School for Academics, to see why the alteration was necessary. 

Onto the Stats

With roughly 1,000 placement tests distributed over the week-long period, nearly 70 percent of participants were placed into their desired courses for both honors and AP testing. 

English, math, and history consistently had the highest percentage of overall testing participants across grade levels and classes. Science courses across the board were taken the least, excluding the system’s two most taken tests for CP and honors chemistry.

“Most of the time, it’s kids who are freshmen or sophomores trying to get into chemistry…but it’s mostly students trying to go from bio to chem who are missing either the grade in bio or the math class for chem,” Barkan said.

Another reason so many students took these two tests was due to the Math II Honors prerequisite necessary for placing into higher chemistry classes.

As for students who participated in AP placement testing but earned scores just below the cut, administration allowed for their placement into the slightly less rigorous honors classes. This made it possible for students to still place into a higher course, even if they were unable to achieve the score required for AP. 

“If they [students] took the AP Lang [test]…but they didn’t pass AP Lang but had a high enough score, we put them into English 11 Honors,” Ms. Barkan said. “We didn’t make them [students] take another one.”

But Why the Change?

For several reasons, placement tests were utilized for this year’s course registration system. Past data showed that students who waived into classes were only succeeding around 50% of the time. 

While some were thriving in the harder classes, many students were struggling, causing their grades to fall not only in the class they waived into but in other courses as well. These students, in addition to having lower grades, found difficulty dropping from AP to Honors or completely down to CP if classes were too full. 

In addition to impacting struggling students, some classes were falling farther and farther behind, causing them to slow down and miss whole units in the process. 

While it was understood that this new system would provide some stress, administration hopes the benefits will outweigh the pressure that this process placed on students. 

“The folks I work with in academics, all my department chairs, and all my teachers absolutely are aware that giving you yet another test to take was a hurdle..and we recognized that. We didn’t want to add stress or anxiety to your world, but we know we did. It wasn’t our intention,” Barkan said.

Unbeknownst to most of the student population, talk about these exams was happening several months prior. In early 2023, the rising 9th graders at the time (Class of 2027) were placed into classes based on their high school placement test, which was taken during the admissions process. If they then wished to enroll in a higher class, placement tests replaced the waivers that were used prior. 

The positive result of this change was convincing evidence to completely eradicate waivers for class registration, as the rates of freshmen dropping out of classes drastically decreased. 

“We’ve seen a 25 percent increase in the past five years in students seeking support through their counselor, our mental health counselor, and tutoring for classes that they were initially not placed into.” Barkan said.

Barkan also commented that the amount of freshmen students asking to drop classes went from 45-50 a year to almost zero in the 2023-2024 school year.

Barkan was especially pleased with the outcome of this year’s placement testing session. She’s hopeful for the future of the testing program, confident that students will benefit long-term from the testing stress and strain.

Test Criteria

All tests were generated by educators of each subject. From there, they were handed off to the department chairs of each subject for review and alterations. As a final step, tests were then distributed to students in the classes the placement tests were designed for. This ensured that questions were logical and up to the course’s standards, allowing teachers to review and revise commonly missed questions.

Contrary to popular belief, tests didn’t contain much content taught in the courses students were placing into. Rather, tests contained information from courses students were currently in. 

“None of the tests tested them on content that they would know had they taken the next class…it was all based on what they should have learned first semester or the year prior.” Barkan said.

Administration plans to alter the system slightly for the sake of testing effectiveness and efficiency. Going forward, educators will look into the possibilities of conjoining tests across subjects, reworking future tests based on the performances of placed students, and limit the test lengths to run for an average of thirty to forty-five minutes.

The Response

Going into the transition from waivers to tests, there was an expectation that student responses would be overwhelmingly negative. Even Barkan believed that there would be an adverse reaction. 

“I expected it to be pretty brutal. Understandably. I was ready and my team was ready. I would say that kids and parents…were fantastic.”

With this in mind, the staff set out to help both parents and students understand why the change was implemented and show that it really was a decision made with the well-being of the students at the forefront of their minds. Barkan explained her instructions to the faculty, to help all people in the Cardinal Gibbons community navigate these changes.

“I basically tasked all of us with, ‘You respond to every single email or phone call. You invite folks for meetings…we have to listen. We have to hear what folks have to say.’”

Several students who took these exams have since voiced their opinions on the process and the differences from previous years. 

Junior Addy Mitchell said, “I felt like it was pretty manageable. I would’ve rather had waivers no matter what, but I don’t think it was that bad.” 

She spoke on the helpfulness of the study guides in preparing for the exams, and considered them to be fair for the course. 

However, this was not the only time that the topic of studying for these assessments came up. Numerous students, including junior Amelia Bristow, talked about the importance of studying for these tests.

Looking back, she believes that these exams were fairly easy, with proper studying. However, Bristow noted that those who did not study found obtaining the goal benchmarks to be rather difficult.

Another subject matter that came up frequently when discussing the use of placement tests was the PSAT marks required for more advanced classes. 

While sophomores Charlotte Medlin, Eva Robison, and Abby Gissel felt that the testing was fair, most placement tests were required for students who did not hit the PSAT marks when they took the standardized test back in Oct. 2023. The whole group felt that there was a legitimate reason for the usage of testing, but the daunting PSAT requirements hindered a large population of students from registering for certain classes. 

Medlin said, “I feel like if a kid doesn’t perform well on the PSAT, that isn’t an accurate representation of a whole semester’s work.”

This was a widely debated topic that a majority of students called attention to. Ahead of registration for the 2024-2025 school year, some of the PSAT requirements were lowered  slightly but still proved difficult for some students to achieve.

Similarly to Mitchell and Bristow, Medlin highlighted the list of topics on the tests being announced ahead of time, saying that it provided a basis for what students had to look over and study.

The general consensus was that overall, with proper preparation, the tests were manageable. However, students would have still preferred to have waivers. These tests may have caused stress for many, but hopefully, as classes start next year, a major decrease in dropped classes, failing grades, and stressed students will occur.