As most students know, New Berlin West has implemented a new exam schedule this year for all students. Gone are the block periods of the past. Students this year will now  have regular eight-period days where it is a teacher’s choice as to whether he or she wants to give an exam. In the past, every class was required to have some sort of culminating exam, whether it was a project or a traditional scantron exam. Now they are neither required nor encouraged to have a final exam.

The impetus for this change is to give teachers the ability to continue teaching their class if they feel that an exam is not necessary, or to administer that exam whenever it fits best into their schedule. Principal John Budish said that he did not want an, “artificial end to the learning in the middle of the year.”

Budish stated that in some classes there is really no need for a final exam or a final project. He said that, for example, in an art class there does not need to be a certain project done as a final exam, instead they should be able to continue with their normal work and instruction in the class. “In math classes you will still see an exam, but in other classes you will not because it is not natural and doesn’t make sense,” Budish said.

This new exam schedule works out for many students who will have fewer exams that they will need to study for and take, but for other students they have almost as many exams as before compacted into two days. This situation was supposed to be avoided by teachers from different classes working together to stagger their exams so that most students would not have more than two or three exams in a day. Budish acknowledged that this is not how it actually turned out and hopes that they can do a better job of it in the future. He also did say that if any student has  four exams in one day they should come and talk to him, and they will try to work with a student’s exam schedule.

Another concern that students raised was the fact that they can no longer exempt an exam anymore. This a concern that is very valid if a student still has exams in most of his or her classes, however, Budish stated that in the future, students, “Won’t really have enough exams going on,” meaning that he envisions that in future years students will have so few actual exams that it would not be logical for them to offer an exemption. Of course this vision is unproven, but it seems to be the direction that New Berlin West is going in.

“We want teachers to have the flexibility to access learning in their classes according to what’s right for that class,” Budish.