The new 2023-2024 school year brings changes to policies and classes. The late work and retake policy is one of the newly implemented changes to DGS classrooms.

While late work or assessment for learning (AFL) has been accepted before, the new rule is that there will be no grade penalty for late work. Whatever work is late does have to be turned in before the unit test or final, which is called an assessment of learning (AOL).

Students can now retake AOLs in any class this year. In previous years retake policies changed depending on the academic department. Now every class is required to let students retake/revise their AOL’s given they have met the requirements, that being they have turned in all their work.

Even though there is no grade penalty for late work, students that turn their AFLs late aren’t able to do the reassessment for that unit. AFLs aren’t able to be revised even if turned in on time.

AP Psychology teacher Brian Szweda shares his thoughts on the retake policy and how it can help and affect students.

“I think there are pros and cons to it. It helps their grade, theoretically helps them learn material because they have to go back and look at it, but it could also lead to students maybe not preparing as well as they should originally and kind of rely on the retake, and the whole problem with that in a class like mine is when you go to take the AP test, there is no retake, so if you get used to just relying on retakes and then you go take that test in May, there is no retake, so if you don’t do well the first time your score is what it is, then getting used to doing retakes is not going to help you there,” Szweda said.

Szweda expresses his concern about students becoming dependent on retakes, especially students taking AP classes, that are also planning on taking the AP test for that course in the spring.

This new policy implementation is meant to help students excel in their classes. Junior Samantha Ortiz expresses her opinion on the policies.

“I honestly just do my work in order to try and get the best grade I can get the first time, but if I do need to end up taking the opportunity that we have for the retake policy, I will,” Ortiz said.

To be able to utilize the retake policy students are required to fill out a reassessment Google Form posted on Google Classroom. This retake form is the same for all classes and any teacher will accept the form. When one goes to fill out the form, it will ask for what class the retake is for and then proceed to ask more clarifying questions such as: What grade the students got on the test, what caused them to earn this grade, what are the doing to prepare for the retake and a reflection question on what will the student do to perform better on future assessments.

Students are given a time period of two weeks after the original testing date to retake their AOL and all the work leading to that assessment should be turned in by then.