As the school year comes to an end, the student parking lot is empty compared to just a week ago. The seniors may be gone, but the junior students are still here. While school is important, almost every AP course that juniors are in is doing nothing in their classes but watching movies or playing games. The reason students even show up is because of the exam exemption policy that requires students to have three or less absences to exempt out of the final exam (it is five in a 1st period exam). What is the point of students that have shown up all year being forced to show up and sit in practical seat time? The Midlothian High School exam policy is flawed and other students are upset.
“I feel like I have to come in when I am sick now because I don’t want to be teetering around the absence limit,” Declan Flood, 11, said.
Flood is not alone. Attendance, for those that were already chronically absent all year, is still low as they have accepted that they will have to take an exam and there is no point in showing up just to sit and do nothing.
So, what is a possible solution to this problem – make final exam exemption absences not count past the AP exam for the course. While this may deter students from showing up at all, we can look at semester one absences. Semester one absences do not matter for any reinforcement except in the calculation of seat time. For the students with great attendance, this end of the year freedom would provide a reward for actually showing up to school the whole year.
Coming from personal experience, I am enrolled in five AP courses this year and in four of them, there are no more assignments for the year. In my AP United States History class, we were given two weeks to create a Spotify playlist of songs that relate to our past unit.
CollegeBoard is pushing back AP exams. This year, the last AP exam fell on May 17, which is a late date compared to past years. There is no reason to continue to have this attendance policy when the last AP exams now fall after seniors are out of the building.
