As the end of semester approaches, one of students’ greatest challenges is managing all of the missing assignments they must turn in before the semester ends. In order to ease this debacle, some teachers, including publications teacher Michael Sullivan, decided to enter final grades as zeroes before students turn them in to allow students to see which assignments were missing before the semester ends.

One teacher who attempted to input grades early this year was Web Page Design and Computer Graphics teacher Ben Stamey, who faced challenges last year in notifying students of outstanding assignments.

“Last year, I waited until right before finals and surprised some people when they saw the grades … I wanted to avoid that this year,” Stamey said.

However, the sudden influx of failing grades in the gradebook concerned some students, parents and coaches.

“There were some that didn’t [like early grading] because their grade at the time took a big turn … and that caused some problems with Early Release and eligibility that were able to be corrected, but it caused some confusion that I wasn’t prepared for,” Stamey said.

Stamey made sure to clarify to his classes that if a student approached him, he would gladly change the grades back to no count if there had been a major effect on the student’s grade, but there was still a large amount of uncertainty regarding the grading.

“[The] problem is everyone’s upset because he’s putting in the final grades … but he [Stamey] said it himself, if there’s a problem that’s going to come to you before the semester actually ends, you can talk to him … and he’ll put them [the grades] in as no counts,” said junior Connor Young, a member of Stamey’s class.

Despite the confusion, Stamey intends to stick with a similar system of grading next semester, with some necessary adjustments.

“I still like entering them [grades] well before finals start to avoid that confusion,” Stamey added. “But I think trying a more regular pace as opposed to all at once would be a clearer indication of what’s actually happening, not a big surprise.”