The Keystone School, Reston | Fees, Rankings, Address, Admission, Vacancies, Reviews & More

Some of the teachers were excellent, some were less so. One course was problematic because the teacher had to grade written responses and hadn’t looked at how the material was taught or what was being asked and graded the problem as wrong, or expected more information than the problem asked for. This was very frustrating.

The curriculum: errors in places and the teachers response is usually “I didn’t write it, I just grade the work,” math especially doesn’t teach concepts thoroughly enough and leaves student frustrated, and other issues I won’t list here.

When communicating with the helpline, it seems they don’t understand my concerns or questions and do not accept any of my feedback for solving the problem.

The latest problem I had was seeing the final grades on the last submitted work and cumulative grade for the end of the course. When the last assignment is done, the course closes and is removed from the student homepage and the student and parent have no access to see recently graded work, comments on work, and the final course grade without having to call each time and ask for it. This curriculum is designed and touted as great for those who travel, or need a flexible work schedule. While it is this for the most part, it isn’t when it comes to finishing out a course. The suggestion I received was to check grades every night. This is just not always possible. If you don’t check every night before midnight, and the last assignments were graded, poof, it all disappears, just like Cinderella’s coach does at the stroke of midnight.

It was a okay school for me, I did not have much connections with teachers since I did assignments and all that all by myself. Sometimes I ask questions about technical supports. Advantages and disadvantages of this school is shown below:

Advantages of this school is that you can study from anywhere (I studied from Japan only for senior year) and I am thankful that I was able to do it. Everything is also self-paced and I could get ahead but I chose to follow the schedules that they give us depending on how you set the time frame to complete school. That was a nice feature they had. In order to finish classes successfully, you got to be self-disciplined, though.

However, there were some disadvantages. some answers on the tests were misleading and I needed to ask teacher to fix the answer through email (that usually took time.) Also, as someone already said here, there are tons of essays you have to write, or type in. Although I used to study in public school for 3 years until my junior year, I was not given this much of essays! You can cheat to earn credits on essay (I did once on the last assignment) over some teacher who just gives you the full credits on any assignment. This could be a cons for some!

Overall, it was a good experience studying online and I got high school diploma.