Bridgewater, Va.- Seniors graduating this spring received grades on their FILA-450 portfolios on or before March 7, and many students are content with the grades they received and have decided not to revise their portfolios.

“It feels like a weight off my shoulders, because I had barely any time to do that,” said senior Emma Clouse. “I know I got at least a B, and I’m okay with that. I’m so happy I don’t have to revise it.”

Revisions are mandatory for students who received an F, but all students have the option to revise their portfolios to improve their grades. The deadline for revisions is April 4 at 8 a.m.

“I think I did a lot better than I had anticipated,” said senior Yasmine Sebitti, who is also choosing not to revise her portfolio. “If I wanted to do a little bit better I would, but honestly I don’t want to spend too much time on it because I already filled the requirement.”

Sebitti, who is majoring in political science, worked on her portfolio throughout the fall semester as part of PSCI-470.

“I was fairly prepared compared to a lot of my other peers. I took a senior seminar class with Dr. Josefson and we spent most of our class preparing for that,” said Sebitti. “I spent the whole semester working on that as a class assignment. I would give a lot of props to my senior seminar professor, because he broke it down. Everyone else was scrambling and trying to work on it but we were done – which helped a lot.”

Other students also felt like their majors and undergraduate experience gave them an advantage in completing both their reflective essays and finding artifacts. 

“I guess what helped me with this assignment the most was that I wrote a lot of papers during my undergraduate career, so I was prepared going into the reflective essay,” said senior Walter Robb, who is majoring in sociology. “I feel like they could better prepare us, the school in general, with courses on website building to get students ready for this. Figuring out how to build a website was the most difficult part of this.”

Robb has also decided not to revise his portfolio as he received a nearly perfect score, and while many students are not revising their portfolios unless they failed, some are still choosing to.

“It’s okay, I didn’t do awful, I still passed, but I’m still going to redo it because it’s easy fixes,” said senior Dani Jenkins. “I used Google Docs for a lot of my artifacts, and [the professor] couldn’t get access to some of them. Instead of trying to talk to me, she just didn’t give me points for entire sections.”