With the start of the second semester on Monday, Frisco ISD secondary schools are embarking on the final set of 6-week grading periods as the district is switching to a 9-week grading period  beginning with the 2019-2020 school year.

“If you’re in a six week grading period especially in the first semester, some of those six weeks are really five weeks and students have to show mastery of whatever they’re learning,” FISD director of secondary curriculum and instruction Amanda Campbell said. “You have to prove that you’ve learned it and get your grade. Teachers have to set all those grades in motion and you really only have a short time to do it. To really prove that you know something and that you’ve shown enough mastery of all of the content, that gets to be really difficult.”

The addition of three weeks to each grading period may help teachers more accurately cover all content.

“It will definitely allow us as teachers to get deeper into the material,” Pre-Calculus teacher Amber Bennett said. “[We can] have more assessments to have a more accurate reflection on their grade instead of feeling so rushed at the end of six weeks to get everything done.”

A 6-week grading period can often lead to multiple tests on the same day or close together, but the new marking period could mean major grades may get spread out more evenly.

“I feel like it puts less pressure on us as teachers to get assessments done,” biology teacher Kristen Newton said. “Hopefully going forward you all as students won’t have a biology test and a math test and an english test all in the same week and spread that stuff out and do more project type stuff.”

For students such as sophomore Madeline Guanio, the longer grading periods will allow her  more time to bump up lower grades.

“I think that it’s going to be a good idea because it gives me more time to get your grade up if you had a really bad grade,” Guanio said. “It also gives you more opportunity to learn more things and it gives you more time.”

Not all students are looking forward to the change. Flashing back to elementary school grading periods, junior Giorgia Mastrolorenzo isn’t ecstatic for the new grading periods in the 2019-20 school year.

“I don’t really like it because the six weeks gave me something to look forward to,” Mastrolorenzo said. “There wasn’t that big of a hump to go through but now we’ll be looking for the next eight weeks, the next seven weeks until it finishes. I’m not really looking forward to it. To be honest, it’ll probably lower [stress] but it doesn’t give me the motivation to try to get through school.”

One of the few unknowns about the change involves the timeline for dropping AP and pre-AP classes. Currently this is allowed at the end of the first 6-weeks and the end of the first semester.

“We don’t have a final answer on that,” Campbell said. “We have a group of people, teachers, directors, and coordinators, exploring that so we are getting a lot of feedback on that. We’re expecting drops to remain at six weeks so that that happens at the eligibility point where we have to have a six week elibilibly mark anyway for UIL purposes. We are still exploring that as we move into next year.”