Summer vacation offers a wonderful opportunity for adventure, creativity, and imagination often needed during a young adult's adolescence. However, many children and teens often lose their sense of work ethic during the summer, something that they worked so hard to achieve throughout the school year. To retain this sense of work ethic during the summer, many schools often require students to complete summer projects for a grade. Summer projects should be teacher-designed as opposed to student-designed in order to ensure the project is on the right topic and to leave no room for error during grading or cheating.

Firstly, summer projects should be teacher-designed as opposed to student-designed in order to leave no room for error during grading and to eliminate the possibility of cheating. When teachers design their own projects for their students, they have a clear picture of what is required of their students and how to grade them to a high standard. To ensure this, for example, teachers create rubrics that match exactly how they want projects to be done. This leaves no room for error in student projects, as they can follow word for word what the rubric says with no confusion. When students do not have rubrics and are tasked at designing a project for themselves, it is more time consuming for the teacher, as they have to grade each project individually, leaving more room for error as the projects are open-ended, and unfair as each student is then held at a different standard due to uniqueness of projects. Another example of leaving no room for error is a teacher's use of the website

Turnitin. com. Turnitin is a website that teachers use that examines grammar, spelling, use of proper citations, and plagiarism. This Einstein of a website ensures that every project, paper, and presentation that is written online can successfully be graded without the worry of plagiarism, something that lazy students often turn to as a result of desperation after a long period of procrastination. Summer projects that are teacher-designed can use

Turnitin as a grading system to make sure that there is no plagiarism or cheating between students in the school or county, as it would be hard to do if each project was student-based, because many students often prefer to submit their projects using paper-boards or by printing them. Even though the students could have easily plagiarized or cheating on their presentations, teachers will never know unless they use

Turnitin and design the project for themselves. Summer projects should be teacher-designed instead of student-designed because it ensures that every students' project will be on the same topic and graded the same way to ensure fairness, accurate grading, and more time efficiency.

Secondly, summer projects should be teacher-designed as opposed to student-designed to make sure that every student is doing a project on the right topic. By letting teachers design their own summer projects, students are introduced early to what they will be learning throughout the school year in order to get back into the groove of schoolwork and school. An example of these projects are advanced placement biology courses that require summer projects. These advanced placement biology projects are teacher-designed, meaning that the topic, type of presentation, and rubric are already picked for students. When the project is teacher-designed, students are able to better grasp the details of the project and have an insight on what they are going to learn in the actual course. This also helps students come to school prepared, having foreknowledge of the topic the course starts with, which boosts confidence and ease in the class, as opposed to when students design their own summer projects, which may not even be about the core topics learned class, and eventually proven to be unnecessary. Another example of how teacher-designed projects ensure that every student is doing a project on the right topic is by requiring the student to do required reading and research before the class begins, such as in literary courses that require students to read specific books throughout the course. When students are required to read specific books, such as

Lord of the Flies in tenth grade and

The Great Gatsby in eleventh, students are less likely to read the book, instead opting for reading a summary of the book and spoilers online, and in some cases, watching the movie. When a student is tasked with designing their own project for a book or other topic, they always choose an easier, more simple topic that requires no effort or actual understanding of the book. However, when teachers design projects, they ask for specific knowledge of the events that happened the a book, requiring students to use quotes or examples from the text, essentially forcing them to actually do the reading and create an understanding for the book themselves. This is a good thing, because it ensures that the students are actually learning, as opposed to taking the easy way out of things and barely putting effort into their project. Summer projects should be teacher-designed as opposed to student-designed to make sure that every student is doing a project on the right topic because it gives students an understanding of what the course will be like to better prepare students for the fall and because it leaves no room for low-effort projects or mistakes.

Though the summer is often associated with fun and adventure, it should leave no room for procrastination, a monster that eats at your work ethic and feeds on laziness. By having teacher-designed summer projects as opposed to student-designed ones, this eliminates procrastination and cheating, room for error in grading and student confusion, and gives student's an opportunity to get a head start in the course and come into the fall with a foreknowledge of the course at hand.