Summer assignments are a staple of high school level classes. They are created in order to properly prepare a student for the difficult class that they are about to take, to act as an assurance of knowledge from a previous class, and to enable students to determine what to expect from the class. These assignments have traditionally been designed by the teachers for the class they are assigned from or by the head of the department at the school. Either way, the summer assignment completes its task: to prepare students. However, a summer assignment created by a student would vary from one that is created by a teacher. A student-designed assignment would be too simple for the student to properly achieve their goal. It is evident that the summer assignment should be teacher-designed because the teachers know the curriculum of their course, can better assist students than any other resource, and are significantly more skilled in assignment creation than the students.

An obvious reason why teachers should create summer assignments over students is their knowledge of the curriculum. A teacher has been studying or teaching the content of the course for multiple years, and is more experienced than students at the course content. The teacher is able to create a foundation using the summer assignment because they have an understanding of what needs to be learned before coming to class on the first day. As a high school student, I have had many summer assignments, including the assignment for AP World History. The assignment was teacher-designed and included reading a novel, writing a summary, a list of examples, and a short paper. Although this assignment may seem tedious, since it contains multiple writing parts and a 200 page reading about multiple topics, it provided me with an understanding of the course load and the content of the course. It completed its job of preparing me for the course, and I ultimately got an A on the first quiz and subsequent quizzes by using my notes from the summer assignment. Summer assignments may seems long, excruciating, and useless, eventually end up being a tool to help you succeed. That quality is lacking in the summer assignments that are student-designed. Students like to spend their summer break doing exactly that: being on break. The last thing students want to do is spend time on schoolwork, so they would design the most minimal summer assignment possible and gain little to nothing out of it. The lack of a proper summer assignment leads to the student not attaining a grade that they would have with a teacher-designed summer assignment. Thus, a student-designed assignment is less effective at integrating with the content than a teacher-designed assignment.

An alternate reason why the teacher-designed summer assignments are more effective than other assignments is the resources provided for the assignment. Throughout the summer, students can ask teachers questions via email. Because there is a uniform assignment across all students, students are able to not only ask for help from a teacher but also from their fellow peers who are taking the class with them and have the same assignment. Teachers can answer questions about the assignment faster because they know what they are looking for. Students that are taking the same class would have designed their own summer assignments, and would be unable to help each other because their assignments would be different. In the summer before AP Computer Science, I was given an assignment to build a program that would display the class roster. This assignment was up to the student to design; there were no guidelines given by the teacher. After about a week, I was able to manufacture a working program on my own. However, my friends were unable to complete the assignment. I tried to help, but their code was so drastically different from mine that I couldn't understand it. If the assignment wasn't difficult enough, the teacher notified us that because all documentation is online, he would not be available for questions. This is a prime example of how student-designed summer assignments is a disaster. The assignment ended up not graded and was a waste of time since it did not provide the students with an effective revisit of the prerequisite course.

Finally, a third reason why student-designed summer assignments are ineffective lies in experience. A student completes assignments; rarely does one design one. In designing an assignment, one looks at the course as a whole and pick specifics to create questions around. Students, however, do not have the experience in creating questions with proper language, and it is rare that a student designs a summer assignment and can ask questions the same way that a teacher would. In CS Research class, we are asked to create questions before we learn content. In concept, this works out well, since we answer our own questions as we learn the unit. The flaw in this lies in the students not knowing what the teacher wants us to ask about. The inability to create questions regarding a topic that one hasn't learned yet is a main reason why that class has a low average grade. This conclusion can be further extrapolated and applied to summer assignments. The incapability to create questions leads to failure to create a fundamental foundation of the course content.

It is clear that those who are most fit to create a summer assignment for students are the teachers. This is due to the knowledge of the course that the teachers have, the resources, or lack thereof, for the assignment, and the content of the assignment being different from what the teacher wants. The teacher is the one who determines what is taught and how one is graded, as well as the one who designs all the other assignments for the rest of the year, so it would be out of place for a student to design one very important assignment. Therefore, the summer assignments that prepare students for a difficult class should be teacher-designed.