The end of the quarter is looming and you are in a panic. You have zero out of 15 Accelerated Reading points, and the clock is winding down. You guess your way through the quiz of a book you never read, trying desperately to save your grade.

This problem will no longer plague the student body. Accelerated reading is officially gone.

AR, which was intended to get students to read more, ending up being an afterthought in the minds of students. This system required students to attain a certain amount of points to reach their goal. For many students, this meant reading several books and quizzing on them.

Mr. Tim Hurrianko, the last of the teachers to use AR, has now abandoned it for a new program. This program is similar to AR, in that you have to read a book and take a quiz.

However, this new website has much less books available to quiz on than previously with AR. If the website does not have a quiz, the student is required to make their own.  

One issue with AR was that the point goal was often too high for most students to achieve. The new system does not require an outrageous amount of points.

“I always felt that there was not enough time in a quarter to get so many points,” says sophomore Annalise Dagenbach.

This system, while extremely similar to AR, actually makes it easier on the students. The higher your reading level, the less points you have to acquire. Even if your level is a little lower, the point goal is much lower than the average AR point goal.

The student is graded on quizzes that are taken via ReadnQuiz, a website that allows people to make in depth quizzes on any book they want.

AR may be gone at the high school level, but it lives on in elementary and middle schools.

“It is gone [in high schools] district wide. It was just too expensive and they didn’t feel it was accomplishing what they wanted,” says Hurrianko.

Hurrianko’s new program has generally been more appealing to students.

“I didn’t have to do AR last year, so for that reason I don’t like the new system, but my goal is only ten points,”  sophomore Julia Lynn says.

Some students do not like the fact that the books they have to read must be nonfiction, as this is not a genre most teenagers usually reach for.

At the end of the day, it is essentially the same program on a different website. However, students across the campus are surely breathing a sigh of relief with the knowledge they no longer have to scramble for as many points.