Every August, when Carlmont students finally get their new schedules, the anxiety that follows rarely stems from the subjects themselves — they selected their courses months ago. Instead, it comes from the names printed next to those subjects.
In our current system, a student’s grade and academic workload often come down to the luck of the draw. While diversity is natural in education, drastic disparities in course difficulty across the same subject have created an unlevel playing field.
Walk down any hallway, and you can find two extremely different versions of the exact same class. In one room, a student might be completing a manageable 30 minutes of homework a night, while just a few classrooms over, another student suffers through hours of busywork. One teacher is more lenient with their grading, while the other is infamously critical.
This creates an obvious equity issue between classes. Transcripts do not include explanations of which teacher a student had, how hard they graded, or what the workload was like compared to other classes for the same subject. College admission officers simply see the final letter grade. When an A in one class requires twice as much time and effort as an A in another, the integrity of the grade system has been compromised.
Especially in Advanced Placement (AP) courses, where students can drop back down into an on-level class, the issue becomes glaringly obvious. Students often sign up for a class, planning to drop it if they get a notoriously hard teacher. When peers begin frantically asking each other whether they should drop a class because of its instructor, it’s a clear sign that something is wrong.
Of course, when calls for standardization arise, the immediate counterargument is often a defense of teacher autonomy. Educators are not robots, and Carlmont is fortunate to have a staff of passionate mentors, each with a unique teaching style. However, this is not an excuse for the same classes, which all have predefined standards, to be worlds apart in difficulty solely because of who is teaching them.
Standardizing a course does not mean forcing teachers to read from a script. Rather, it means establishing conditions where two students who demonstrate the same understanding of the material receive the same grade, regardless of who is standing at the front of the room. It means ensuring an equal workload, not necessarily identical assignments.
A student’s success at Carlmont should be determined by their merit, not by winning or losing a game of “teacher roulette.” By establishing and enforcing course guidelines to standardize difficulty, a fairer, healthier, and more transparent academic environment can be fostered for everyone.
This editorial reflects the views of the Editorial Board and was written by Andrew Liang. The Editorial Board voted 8 in agreement, 4 somewhat in agreement, and 6 refrained from voting.
