Neshaminy High School’s current graduation requirement is for seniors to create a PowerPoint presentation and present it to the Guidance Department. After this year’s seniors graduate, the current graduation project will be replaced with achieving a score of Proficient on the Keystones. However, in either scenario, seniors are forced to meet a standardized level of expectation.

In the case of the PowerPoint presentation, seniors are required to have a title slide, four to eight slides explaining what seniors will do while in college, post-secondary training or the workforce. One to three slides must cover seniors’ plans for their future, and one slide must be a conclusion.

For the Keystones, current underclassmen must score at least a Proficient, and if they fall under that standard, must take remediation courses to as sist them, and ultimately retake the Keystones at a later date.

Keystone exams’ purpose is not to prepare students for college, but rather, meet a state requirement of students taking a state-wide standardized test; the results then determine the amount of federal funding schools receive. With this as a graduation requirement, Neshaminy High School is essentially requiring all students to assist their high school receive more funding.

The current graduation project does, indeed, allow some degree of creativity and self-expression, and in a way that makes evaluating seniors’ futures easy and comparable. However, the graduation project’s purpose should not be to grade seniors’ plans, as they are likely to change over the next few years, but it should prepare seniors for whatever plan they do decide to pursue in a way that motivates them.

The same graduation project applies to students pursuing music, theatre, art, education, athletics, armed forces and the workforce after they graduate. This standardized project is not efficient, nor does it allow students to express their interests, passions and plans to the full extent

Instead, if seniors were allowed to pursue an independent project, one where they create their own guidelines and requirements, and then complete it, seniors would not only be planning for their future, but it would be in a way that interests and motivates each student, instead of requiring every student to follow the same format, use the same guidelines and be judged with the same rubric, despite the diversity among students’ interests and future plans.

This way, the purpose of the graduation project would not be to evaluate students’ abilities to present a PowerPoint, but to allow them to utilize their individual interests, passions and ambitions to shape their own graduation project. Instead of completing the graduation project for the sake of graduating, seniors, while still obligated to complete some kind of graduation project, would instead be allowed to utilize their creativity in however they want.

While we understand the need to evaluate students’ plans for their futures in a reasonable and efficient manner, to make it a graduation requirement limits the possibilities for students to show their true potential. Rather than enforce a requirement that prioritizes meeting expectations, an individual project, shaped by the students themselves, will indeed be more difficult to evaluate, but will encourage students to show what their passions and interests are, while pushing them to think about their future beyond high school.

This unsigned editorial represents the majority view of the Editorial Board