According to Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) guidelines, high school teachers should assign about two hours of homework per week, another limit on how much work a course can have. “I personally do less assigned reading than I used to,” biology teacher Aubrie Holman said. “We kept the things that were most meaningful, and we have digital tools that we can use postpandemic.” Despite the decrease in workload, the amount of time a student puts into a class can depend on the rigor of the course. “If you still have to learn BC Calculus, you still have to learn BC Calculus, whether the teachers are assigning you ten homework problems a night or 50 homework problems a night,” math teacher Kathleen Juster said. However, teachers can prioritize certain assignments to reduce workload without changing the difficulty of a course. “I don’t assign any homework. I think having a few priority items in a class as opposed to a lot of little assignments makes it more likely that the students are going to do their own work,” chemistry teacher Emily Owens said. To achieve a more manageable workload, the gradebook can weigh effort and assessments equally, rewarding students for hard work. “I always try, especially with freshmen, to balance a minor quiz grade with another minor grade, ideally something that prepared them for the quiz,” Holman said. “I’m trying to teach them that good preparation is just as important as performance.” Another method of reducing homework is to increase the class time that students have to complete assignments. “[Students] have the time to work on this and can ask other people to help. But chances are, because you
both have the designated time to do it, you’re actually going to talk about how you did it, as opposed to just copying it,” Owens said. With the previous approaches, a less-overwhelming workload can decrease cheating. But in the short term, teachers can adjust methods of testing to prevent students from being able to cheat at all. “This is gonna sound horrible, but teachers need to come up with different assessments. You can’t roll off the same tests period one through seven because everyone shares information,” Burke said. “We have to accept that [students] are social creatures, that you guys want to help each other, and that it’s so hard to tell a friend, ‘I can’t give you help on this.’ It’s nearly impossible. We need to create different ways to assess people’s understanding of the concepts we’re teaching.” Since Blue Day classes typically take quizzes or tests before Red Day classes, the later periods have the advantage of information being spread within the student body. To combat that difference, teachers can vary the order in which class periods take tests. “Staggering tests would be helpful, like sometimes having [the first test] be in fifth period and [other times] first period, especially for pop quizzes,” Cox said.
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