NJ Schools Cancel, Adjust Midterms Over COVID Concerns

UNION COUNTY, NJ — Midterm season can be accompanied by a lot of pressure and anxiety for high school students. On top of that, the recent surge in COVID-19 cases has only added additional stress for students.

Because of this, many high schools in Union County — and throughout the state — have adjusted their midterms schedule or have done away with them completely this year.

Both Summit High School and Cranford High School canceled midterm exams this year.

Laurene Callander, the Communications Officer for Summit Public Schools, said the decision was made by High School Principal Stacy Grimaldi in collaboration with Superintendent Scott Hough due to the large number of COVID cases and quarantines within the district in mid-December through early January.

"At the time with the 10-day quarantine/isolation period, many students would not be returning to school until right before exams started, and they would have to make up missed work in addition to taking the midterm exam," Callander said in a statement. "Principal Grimaldi felt that this was too much for students and staff to manage in an already stressful situation."

Callander said Summit Schools canceled midterms last year, as well, due to circumstances with COVID-19.

Other schools, like Westfield High School and Millburn High School, have made adjustments to their midterms to take some pressure off of students. In Westfield, midterms will still be held but the duration of the exams will be cut down from two hours to one, thus minimizing the amount of content that students will be tested on.

Westfield Superintendent Dr. Raymond González said in a statement that the high school has not held midterms since 2020 and recognizes the stress that it can cause for students, but the district felt it was important not to eliminate them completely.

"We [...] recognize that midterms and finals are a valuable tool in measuring student progress and are important for preparing students for the cumulative exams they can expect in post-high school study," González said. "So we are taking a gradual, deliberate approach to transition our students back into cumulative assessments."

González said Westfield High School administrators are confident that shortening the exams makes the midterms more manageable while also recognizing the importance of assessing student progress.

A Change.org petition created by Joshua Sacher from Westfield High School called for the district to adjust its midterms this year and follow in Millburn High School's footsteps.

After Millburn students spoke at a Board of Education meeting earlier in January and formed their own online petition — which received hundreds of signatures — Millburn agreed to modify its midterms by allowing exam grades to count only if it benefits a student's semester grade. An exam grade that negatively impacts a student's semester grade will not be counted.

The Westfield High School petition received over 1,600 signatures, and many students left comments on the petition, describing the stress that midterms can cause.

One student, Altai Abrams, left the following comment:

A lot of students, including me, are extremely burnt out. We are facing a lot. While midterms are happening teachers continuously pile on more and more work. It is too much for us to handle, physically and mentally. Additionally, the midterms are not an accurate display of a student's knowledge of a subject. While some students may be great testers, some may blank out because of the stress of a test, giving them an extremely unfair advantage. Schools do not prioritize our mental health and this could at least be a step in changing that. All the school has done is make the test shorter which is not actually helpful, because midterms are still a huge workload.

According to Mary Ann Mcgann, Westfield's Coordinator of School and Community Relations, the decision to reduce the content and duration of the exams was made well before the petition was posted.

Westfield High School recently conducted a survey, asking students how they felt about returning to in-person classes on a more regular basis in the 2021-2022 school year, according to NJ.com. The results showed that of 1,002 students who responded, around 7 percent said they had a hard time adjusting to their return, 13 percent said they had difficulty adjusting and 15 percent said they were "great and adjusting well."

52 percent of students also said in the survey that the workload was "too much on some days," according to school officials.

Other NJ schools, such as Red Bank Regional High School canceled its midterms due to COVID circumstances. Red Bank's Superintendent Louis Moore told NJ Advance Media that the district will not cancel midterms forever, but the school did not want to put certain students at a disadvantage who may have had to quarantine or isolate close to when midterms would be starting.

Moore said teachers can still implement unit and summative assessments to students, and supervisors will be collaborating with teachers to monitor student progress using "alternate benchmarks."

Cranford High School, who also canceled its midterm exams, did not respond for a comment immediately after Patch reached out.

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