In September, when the Townsend Harris STEM Department began a new grading policy that expanded the value of classwork grades through new “progress checks,” administrators envisioned a tool that would help teachers catch struggling students before they fell too far behind for higher stakes unit tests. However, six months into the school year, some students are saying that progress checks bring down their grades by docking points for not mastering material soon after it was taught. 

According to Assistant Principal of STEM Abid Choudhury and Principal Brian Condon, progress checks should assess student readiness for upcoming tests, and give teachers feedback on how well students are digesting lessons. In other words, they should be primarily a diagnostic tool. 

After interviewing students and teachers, there are clear differences in how progress checks have been implemented in different courses.

Mr. Choudhury described progress checks in his class as “formative assessments” that help him determine student understanding of new content. He said that he might give students a progress check in his class, determine that a handful of students in the class did not understand the content and then use that data to meet with those students. He would then check their understanding again afterwards and keep helping them until they understood.

He said all of his students would receive full credit for the progress check because the goal was not to take off points for a lack of understanding, but to identify issues, help students catch misunderstandings, and award them credit for the work they have done to make progress.

Sophomore Marchella Ramos described progress checks in her class as essentially low stakes classwork, more in alignment with Mr. Choudhury’s description. “It’s just kind of like classwork,” she said, “and I feel like you can always make up for it with other classwork opportunities [if you get things wrong on them].”

Many students said, however, that in their classes progress checks often come across more like pop quizzes where students are asked a question on recently learned material (possible from that day’s lesson) and receive a grade on whether or not they answered the question correctly.

“Progress checks are unannounced, so I never really have time to prepare for them,” junior Mila Lyssitakos said. “I especially feel like they can be unfair at the end of the band based on the lesson from earlier during that class period, as you’ve had no opportunities or homework to help you digest the material.”

Mr. Condon said progress checks shouldn’t be quizzes. “[If] students feel as if their grades are being [lowered, and] it feels like a summative assessment dressed up as a formative assessment, then that’s a problem,” he said.

“[Progress checks] mostly harm my grade because they’re out of such low points,” said sophomore Faith Kim. “If I get a 2 out of 3, that’s a 67%, and it drops my [overall] grade.”

According to Mr. Choudhury and Mr. Condon, progress checks should lead to teacher interventions. When students get questions wrong, they say, these are opportunities for teachers to meet with those students to help them better learn the content before the bigger unit exam. 

Mr. Choudhury said, “each progress check isn’t the end of a topic that we learned. It should inform [the teacher’s] next step. And if 10 students don’t understand…then my next steps should be thinking about intervention.” 

Two students who spoke to The Classic said that they’ve received no such interventions after getting questions wrong on progress checks. Mila said that, at most, what will happen is that “if the whole class did bad my teacher would…review it.” 

The Classic reached out to six teachers to comment, with only two (Teacher A and Teacher B) agreeing to speak anonymously about the policy.

Teacher A said that progress checks “help because they do give me more feedback on the students and how they’re doing. But it also harms because I find it’s taking away from class time.”

Teacher B said that they drop the lowest of every five progress checks. “By dropping the lowest out of every five progress checks, students won’t be harmed by one bad day,” they said. “I think the idea behind the progress checks is to encourage students to incrementalize their studying so that they aren’t overwhelmed by the time the exam comes around.

Teacher A said that to their knowledge, no teachers were consulted, and were told about the new policy on the first day of school for teachers. They said this made it difficult to make any changes or have further discussions.

Mr. Choudhury said that he understands it may take time for teachers to get used to the goal of the policy. “There’s a learning curve with this [for teachers],” he said. “Class intervention definitely is something that we as a school have to reconcile.”

Teacher A said that though most students do well on progress checks in their class, the students who don’t do well, “do terrible.” Teacher A said that they find that progress checks simply are not the best strategy for students due to the grade’s weight, which began the year as counting for 30% of each student’s final average. 

At the beginning of the second semester, the STEM department announced a change in the initial 2025-2026 grading system. Mr. Choudhury agreed to reduce the initial value of progress checks from to 20% of the final average, responding to some concerns that the progress checks were too heavily weighted. 

Mr. Choudhury said that “while we reevaluate what progress checks look like, to mitigate the significant effects, the teachers felt like it would be prudent to reduce the percentage.”