The volcano erupted with great force, shaking the room and everything inside. Students screamed while my teacher clapped and jumped for joy. I sat there, upset that I was unable to create something as big and impressive as Generic_Name's newspaper volcano. The presentation of our student-designed summer assignments made me realize that I was not given an equal chance to succeed due to the lack of teacher involvement. Summer projects should be teacher-designed, providing students with an equal opportunity to score well.

All students do not have access to the same resources. In third grade, my teacher gave my class the opportunity to do a summer project of our choosing. It could be about any subject and there was no mandatory format for which the project needed to be presented. Parents were emailed the assignment two weeks before the due date, which was the first day of school. Within those two weeks, I was at daycare everyday while both of my parents were at work. I got home right around bedtime, leaving me no time to work on my project. Along with the limitations of time, my family did not have the ability to purchase materials; I had to use what I could find around the house. My finished product, a short story written on a piece of scratch paper, received a sixty percent from my teacher who interpreted my project as having little effort put into it. Meanwhile, a student who had the money and time to make a large volcano out of newspaper and paint, earned a one hundred percent. Given the task of designing a project with no guidelines, I, along with other students, unintentionally demonstrated a stark difference in the quality of project we were able to create. Resources that influenced our grade, such as time and money, were not equally available to all of us. The difference in students' ability to access resources creates an unfair advantage when students are able to design their own project.

Clear instructions and guidelines are needed for some students to complete a task. Some people, especially those with anxiety or a lack of creativity, rely on rules to effectively complete an assignment given to them. I fall into this category of people, as I become stressed when a teacher allows me to create my own project. In English class, my teachers have assigned essays where students are allowed to write about whatever they want. There were no limitations on length or subject; it was student-designed. My friends and I struggled to write our essays because we did not know what criteria our teacher would be grading us on. Not having a rubric or set guidelines creating anxiety and self-doubt among us that affected our ability to complete the essay on time. I was so anxious to the point where I could not bring myself to write anything because I did not know if what I wrote would earn a good grade. Anxiety that prevents the completion of the assignment is provoked in students when they must rely on themselves to create guidelines.

Students can abuse the freedom of creating an individual assessment. Creating individual guidelines for what a project should focus on and include makes it easy for students to avoid learning to their fullest potential. In middle school, my teacher assigned a project with two objectives: read a book and create a project involving said book. She granted us the ability to design our own project because she thought it would create excitement around reading and encourage us to analyze the book and its meaning. In reality, most students researched a summary of the book and built their project around the information the internet had to offer. The grade they received on the project was not a reflection of their own work, but the work of another person. Students can take the freedom to design their own project as an opportunity to avoid the learning process entirely.

Student-designed summer projects result in an inequality in student achievement that is avoided when they are designed by teachers. Unequal access to resources, along with a lack of guidelines and monitoring on effective learning, makes student-designed projects less fair and effective than those that are teacher-designed.