Across just four days throughout the entire school year, Potomac students have the opportunity to formally view their most recent grades in each of their classes. At minimum, two of these four reports contain comments: one mid-first semester and another mid-second semester. However, in April, The Compass, Potomac’s Upper School Newsletter, announced a new policy that will go into effect for the 2025-2026 school year. Here’s everything you need to know.

While more specific details are still in the works, a section in the newsletter’s announcement written by Ms. Sarah Beck, Interim Head of Upper School, describes more frequent interim grades and a mid-year “narrative report,” which aims “to paint a holistic portrait of each student as a learner.” Whether it is a progress report, conference, narrative report, or interim grades, these academic checkpoints will be provided to students and parents once a month throughout the school year. 

After I met with Ms. Virchow, Upper School Director of Curriculum and Academics, to discuss the reasons behind this policy change, she pointed out numerous conveniences for teachers, students, and parents. First, for parents: currently, each division has separate grading updates and report cycles. These cycles may cause confusion among parents with children in multiple divisions, who might wonder why one of their children has received grade updates and reports while the others have not. Modifying and synchronizing the grade update schedule across all divisions ensures consistency and minimizes confusion. 

Next, teachers and faculty benefit from this change in a few ways. For example, more synchronized cross-divisional reporting cycles will enable school development days to reach higher productivity, since everyone will be working on similar tasks. Furthermore, right now students’ written comments are provided twice throughout the year–in the middle of the first and second semesters–except for a mandatory comment if a student’s grade in a class has changed more than two-thirds of a letter grade (i.e., from an A to a B+). This new policy addresses concerns raised about receiving these comments in the fall, due to only having known students for half a semester. Cecelia Russell ‘27 stated, “I don’t really know my teachers [by that point]. They don’t really know me…Normally, we’ve had like one assignment and one test. So I feel like it doesn’t really make sense to get a grade [and comment] then.” Upper School history teacher Ms. Jen Hellman agreed and commented, “I feel like I don’t know anybody well enough…to really say ‘Honestly, here’s how this kid is doing,’ and I can do that a lot better after a full semester…I’m glad that we’re changing when we write those comments because I think it will give us better information, better data, better feedback.” 

Lastly, for students: seniors can now formally view their grades more, especially before many submit Early Decision and Early Action applications to colleges, with many of those deadlines in early to mid-November. Some current seniors have varying thoughts on the helpfulness of these changes. Leela Iyer ’25 commented, “It’s never not helpful to see grades, in my opinion,” and Brayden Nelson ’25 agreed, stating, “It is definitely helpful. I don’t know if it would have affected my EA/ED [applications], but [seeing grades is] just generally helpful.” Tucker Robbins ’25 noted, “I don’t think that [viewing grades] specifically is helpful, but I do think you should always be able to see your grades.” Senior year aside, it generally provides more frequent reminders of where a student stands in a specific class, potentially offering crucial insights into areas of growth. Ginna Martin ’28 noted, “I think being able to see our grades more often would help us know which classes we need to pay more attention to and which teachers we need to meet with.” As a rising junior enrolling in some challenging classes next year, I agree that more frequent grade updates can better illustrate academic areas that need more attention sooner rather than later.

There has been positive initial feedback surrounding the policy as a whole, but many statements involve the idea of an eventual and (as of now) unintended open grade book. Ms. Hellman stated, “I like the idea of letting kids see on a quarterly basis what their grades are. I don’t like the idea of having essentially an open grade book where you see all the time what you’re getting because I think that that adds stress to your lives. And I think it adds stress to parents’ lives, where it feels like all the time you’re just looking at your grades.” Russell stated that open grade books “just [stress] me out too much,” while Robbins’ previous comment would seem to endorse it. Additionally, Martin notes that her old school “had an online grade book, which was extremely helpful…I know that they [Potomac] doesn’t think we should be so focused on our grades, but they really do matter a lot. And being able to see them whenever we want would be extremely helpful.” Personally, I concur with Cecelia. I firmly believe an open gradebook furthers stress in an already academically rigorous setting. If Potomac had an open gradebook, I would have it bookmarked and viewed daily; so keeping it closed helps people like Cecelia and me better hold our academic peace. 

At the end of the day, Director of Curriculum and Academics Ms. Tory Virchow noted that this policy is not meant to be a “heavy lift for the teachers.” Rather, it intends to help provide “more opportunities to know where [students] stand.” Hopefully, this policy will benefit the Potomac community as a whole.