This year, the NJSLA testing schedule received a drastic revision from last year, with a completely new format from previous years. This year, all students that are testing report to school at their regular times, and will go to their testing rooms immediately. After their testing, they will go straight to their period 1 classrooms at 9:50. All students not taking testing on these days will also report to school at this time. From there, all students will follow a delayed opening schedule with shortened periods for the remainder of the day. In previous years however, students simply missed the class periods in which they had testing and followed a standard schedule for the rest of the day.

Benefits for Testing Students

The new testing schedule provides students that are testing with benefits that were nonexistent in previous years. The most blatant of these advantages is the fact that students will no longer have to miss classwork. In the past, students were forced to miss many classes and were therefore required to make up work for the classes that they missed. This was also difficult for teachers to coordinate with different students testing every day. With the new schedule, all students will still go through their normal schedules and will not end up missing any work. Another obvious benefit of the new schedule is how uniform it is. It is a lot easier for students to get to their testing when it is at the same time every day than from when it was scattered throughout the day. This means that students are unlikely to miss their testing and will arrive on time more often.

Benefits for Non-Testing Students
Even for students who are not testing during these designated days, many benefits are still present. Students who are not testing are able to sleep in longer and do not have to get up for classes that would normally be half empty. This allows them to be more productive and get more work accomplished even in shortened periods after testing is done for that day. Freshman Rehaan Shah is able to experience some of these benefits. “I love this new schedule. It’s great to be able to sleep in and not have to go to classes where almost everybody is testing,” states Shah. The new schedule is a win-win scenario for students of CHS, and is overall a huge step-up from the disorganized mess from previous years.