Midterm Comments
By: David Chen, Jessica Huang, Hannah Park, Athena Wang
Students received midterm comments instead of end-of-term comments this winter. Teachers made use of the additional February 1-10 break to prepare comments, which were made available via Lion Links on Feb. 8.
Many students expressed approval of the change, citing midterm comments to be more constructive to their learning experience compared to final comments. “The [midterm comments] allowed me to reflect and see my areas of improvement for the remainder of the term. I like midterm comments over final comments because we can actually take the feedback and incorporate it in class,” upper Valentina Kafati said.
“It's nice to have a reflection on what I can improve halfway through the term as opposed to the end,” lower Leyla Unver added. “[They] felt more progress-oriented than a cumulative list followed by a short list of things to improve on in the future.”
Prep Angel Guo noted the helpfulness and relevance of midterm comments to students. “I think end-of-term comments summarize your progress throughout the course and may be helpful to teachers/administrators, but unless I am continuing the class the following term then I don't really use them much,” Guo said.
Additionally, some students found midterm comments helpful to gauge their performance in their classes. “It's sometimes hard to tell how to improve or where I stand with a teacher, so having them write constructive feedback was helpful,” lower Michael Chen said. “[End-of-term comments] let you improve for terms to come, but different teachers can have different teaching styles and different ideas for how students should do things.”
Some students were concerned about the quality of the comments prior to receiving them. “I think some teachers run out of things so say [or] repeat comments for a multitude of students as they have only known their students for a few weeks,” Guo said.
“The fact that students and teachers don't really get to interact much and have that face to face interaction can already make it difficult for students and teachers to connect. When you add less time spent together on top of that, I can definitely see some teachers running out of things to say,” senior Hojun Choi said. “Especially since it's difficult to really show your personality on Zoom, I definitely feel like connections formed could be weaker.”
Choi added, “In the end-of-term comments, teachers can often comment on the progression of a student whereas, with midterm comments, the time simply doesn't allow that to happen. However, I was still pleasantly surprised with midterm comments as they were still thoughtful, helpful, and relatively in-depth,” Choi said.
Some teachers also saw midterm comments as a way to provide students with feedback on their learning thus far. “Midterm comments provide an opportunity for students to know how they are doing in the course and which areas they could improve,” Chinese Instructor Ning Zhou said.
Other teachers were unsure of having midterm comments in the future due to limited time. “These comments [were] very demanding and time intensive making them challenging mid-term,” Science instructor Sydnee Goddard said. “They were doable this term because we had time off.”
Science instructor Townley Chisholm agreed. “A teacher only has so much time. If we are required to write mid-term comments then something else must go,” he said.
Despite challenges posed by time constraints, Chen hopes that midterm comments will continue in the future. “Personally I've found that at the end of the term, there can be too many things to say, so teachers will give a more summary-like comment, less focused on tangible advice for improvement. I would very much like the Academy to do this in the future,” Chen said.