Upper School students have a variety of opinions about mid-semester comments, which were released on Oct. 31. 

“They’re personalized, and they give you specific examples of what you did in class,” freshman Joshua Chan said. 

Some students, however, say they believe comments are ineffective and can even hurt student performance. 

Sophomore Ethan Sadka says that comments are too critical of students and said that teachers should have a conversation with students before comments come out.  

“They read a comment that a teacher writes and if they get bad feedback, they stop liking the teacher and stop putting in the effort for the class,” he said. 

Sophomore Arman Makhani says he believes that comments have limited effects on student performance. 

“Most teachers just put Meets [Expectations] for everything,” Makhani said. 

Freshman Aditi Karthik says that the rollout of comments should be staggered by grade. 

“I think for teachers, writing comments for every single student they have across different grades is really hard, so what ends up happening is they just copy and paste the template into each comment,” Karthik said. 

Upper School English teacher Blake Harkey says comments are useful for parent-teacher conferences.  

“As an advisor, I really appreciate the timing of having the comments followed closely by the conferences, because it gives me a direction as I’m planning the conversations,” Harkey said. “We read them together at the conferences.” 

The change in style of comments has shifted in recent years from being about the student to being addressed to the student. 

“I think that’s done a fair amount to make it easier for me to be a little more concise,” Harkey said. 

Harkey said students often focus on the wrong things when discussing comments with their peers, noting they mainly focus on the grades. 

“If I had my way, I wouldn’t mention grades in the comments at all, because you should pretty much already know where you are, Harkey said.  “I’m more interested in writing something that’s prescriptive towards overall improvement.” 

Despite mixed student reactions to mid-semester comments, Harkey still says he thinks they are an important part of student improvement. 

“For the students who do read them, it is effective, and for the advisors who are planning conferences, it’s an invaluable asset to planning those,” Harkey said.