Sophomores are being introduced to the personal project this month. It is run through the International Baccalaureate program and is a capstone project for the Middle Years Program. One of the goals of MYP is for students to learn about themselves and their role in the world. This is why sophomores go through the process of the personal project.
This year’s junior class recently received its scores. English teachers handed out a certificate with the final scores and many juniors were shocked about how they rated. Junior Meah Delgado felt as though she was graded unfairly with her score. “I got a 2 and I don’t think it was graded fairly because as an IB student I know there are a lot of requirements on what you should be answering and the formatting of things. But the school just had us do slideshows. If that’s what was graded, I think it’s unfair. Especially because me and my supervisor know I put a lot of effort into it,” Delgado stated.
Delgado believed that her project had merit because it centered on her own learning and emotional wellness. “I learned how to sew; I was really interested in learning when I was little. Sewing was something I wanted to do because we didn’t have a sewing machine and the school provided it,” Delgado said.
Students weren’t alone in sharing their opinion about the MYP project ratings. IB language arts teacher Ms. Elizabeth Dent voiced her concerns about the scores. “The scores we gave them were much higher than IB gave them. I think there was a portion that we were unaware of that caused the lower scores, but I would also like some feedback so we wouldn’t make the same mistakes,” Dent said.
“I was shocked about how low they (the scores) were and I wonder what happened,” Dent continued ” I personally saw about 60 personal projects and was the supervisor for five of them.”
Junior Jeremy Piacenza had a different outlook than many the other IB students. “I made a cheesecutter because I like carpantery. I got a 3 on my project, and I feel fine about my score because I felt like the project was a nice intro into IB,” Piacenza said.
IB/MYP coordinator Ms. Kaylyn Kingman did her best to explain the personal project scores. “The MYP criteria was the part that we did not make enough time for to teach people how to use the scoring rubric. A lot of what the scores were was higher than what IB would consider the scores to be as,” Kingman explained.
Kingman said most students scored in theme point range. “A lot of our students scored a 2 or a 3 on the personal project and the highest someone could score is a 7. I think that’s where we’re at because we were too kind with our scoring. As much as everyone worked so hard, it just didn’t meet what IB had anticipated what we would meet,” Kingman explained.
Kingman said teachers just went too easy on the students. “I think people were taken aback, like, ‘I though I scored better on this.’ So this makes (the) messaging of (the personal project), ‘Is it okay that we score people higher and make people feel good about what they did?’ Or (do we set) the expectation of what’s supposed to be communicated,” Kingman said.
