How to Measure Whether an Elective Program Is Working

TL;DR

• Most schools judge a new elective program by the wrong number. Enrollment tells you students signed up. It does not tell you they are learning anything, and a completion rate alone can hide a course that students click through without thinking.
• Five measures tell you more: are students starting, are they coming back, is the work real, does the supervising teacher trust it, and do students choose it again. Every one of them can be checked by a principal in under an hour a week.
• Decide what "working" means before the semester starts, write it down, and bring those same measures to your board in December. A program judged against its own goals survives budget season. A program judged on a feeling does not.

When a school adds electives, the first question from the board is usually about cost. The second question, a semester later, is harder: is it working?

Most heads of school answer that question with the number they have, which is enrollment. Forty students signed up for electives this fall. That sounds like success, and it tells you almost nothing. A student can be enrolled in a course they opened twice in September.

I run a small Christian school, Rosedale Christian Academy in Baltimore, and every middle and high school student there takes electives on the platform I built. So I have had to answer this question about my own students, in front of my own board, with my own name on it. This post is the framework I use.

Why enrollment and completion are not enough

Program evaluation guides for training programs usually start with completion: what percentage of participants finished? That is a reasonable starting point for a workplace course. For a high school elective, it has two problems.

First, completion arrives too late. You learn your completion rate in December, after the semester you could have fixed is over.

Second, completion can be hollow. A course can show a student as finished while the student wrote three-word answers to every question. If your only measure is a checkmark, you will celebrate a program that taught nothing, and your board will eventually find out.

The better approach is borrowed from the standard four-level model of program evaluation: reaction, learning, behavior, results. Translated for a school leader with an elective program, that becomes five questions you can actually answer.

Measure 1: Are students starting?

The first sign of trouble is a student who has a seat and has never opened a lesson.

This is the most common failure in any new elective program, and it is almost never about the course. It is about setup. Across the schools we work with, one pattern has held every time: students start when they are assigned to a specific course, not when the school buys seats. A schedule that says "Elective Lab" with nothing attached produces students who sit and wait. A schedule that says "Intro to Psychology" produces a student who opens lesson one on the first day.

What to check: In the first two weeks, look at every student with a seat. Has each one been assigned a specific course? Has each one signed in at least once? If the answer is no for more than a handful, fix assignment before you judge anything else.

What "working" looks like: Every enrolled student has a named course and has started it within the first week.

Measure 2: Are students coming back?

A strong first week proves very little. Many online courses get a burst of enthusiasm in week one and quiet abandonment by week five.

What you want is a steady rhythm. If the elective meets in a scheduled period, students should be working in it every time that period meets. If it is self-paced outside the schedule, you want regular sessions, not one long weekend of catching up before a deadline.

What to check: Weekly, look at which students have not worked in the course since the last time the class met. That list is short at a healthy school, and the names on it tell you exactly who needs a conversation.

What "working" looks like: Students who were assigned in September are still working steadily in November, and the "has not logged in this week" list is a handful of names, not a third of the room.

Measure 3: Is the work real?

This is the measure most schools skip, and it is the one that matters most.

Open three students' work and read it. Not the grade. The actual answers. Are they writing in full sentences? Are they explaining their reasoning, or guessing? Do the project submissions look like a student's own thinking?

Reading student work is also how you catch problems a dashboard number hides. This fall, reading student work across the schools we serve showed us something no completion figure would have: our quiz grading was marking thoughtful written answers wrong because they did not match the expected wording closely enough. A completion chart would have told us students were stuck. Reading the answers told us why, and we fixed the grading.

That is the point of this measure. Numbers tell you where to look. Reading tells you what is true.

What to check: Every two weeks, pick three students at random, open their most recent lesson and their most recent project, and read them. It takes fifteen minutes.

What "working" looks like: You would be comfortable showing those three samples to a parent, an accreditor, or your board.

Measure 4: Does the supervising teacher trust it?

Every elective program has a supervising adult. In a supervised elective block, that teacher may oversee several courses in the same room in the same period. I wrote about how that teacher spends the period in an earlier post.

That teacher is your best early warning system. They see who is working and who is stalling. They know whether the course content is holding students' attention. And if they stop trusting the program, it will fail quietly no matter what the numbers say.

What to check: Ask the supervising teacher three questions once a month. Which students are thriving? Which are stuck, and why? What would you change? Then do something with the answer.

What "working" looks like: The teacher can name every student's course and roughly where they are in it, and they bring problems to you instead of working around them.

Measure 5: Do students choose it again?

The last measure is the simplest and the most honest. When students choose their spring electives, do they pick another one?

Students vote with their requests. If the program is working, spring requests for electives go up, and students ask for the next course in a pathway. If it is not, they ask to go back to study hall.

What to check: When you collect spring course requests, count how many students who took an elective in the fall request another one. If you are building that request process now, my post on scheduling electives in a small school master schedule walks through the October and November timeline.

What "working" looks like: Most fall elective students ask for another elective in spring, and some ask for a specific next course.

Set the bar before the semester starts

Every one of these measures works better if you decide in advance what "working" means.

Before the semester begins, write down a one-page definition of success. For example: every student assigned to a specific course by the end of week one; no more than a handful of students inactive in any given week; three random work samples a month that you would show to a parent; the supervising teacher's monthly check-in on file; and a clear majority of fall elective students requesting another elective for spring.

Your numbers will differ. The value is in writing them down. A program judged against goals set in August is a program you can defend in December, or honestly decide to change.

This is also what turns a trial into a decision. If you are running a one-semester pilot, these five measures are the scorecard. I covered the structure of a pilot in how to run an elective pilot at a small private school.

What to bring to the board

At semester's end, your board does not need a dashboard. They need four things on one page.

What you set out to do. The one-page definition of success you wrote before the semester.

What happened. The five measures, stated plainly, including the ones that came in short.

What you fixed along the way. Boards trust leaders who catch problems early. A list of two or three things you noticed and changed in October is more persuasive than a page of good numbers.

What you recommend next. Expand, hold steady, or stop. Each one can be the right answer.

If you are still planning that first conversation, I wrote about how to present a new elective program to your school board, including what boards decide and what they should leave to you.

How the tools should help

You should not need a spreadsheet to answer these questions. Whatever platform you use, the supervising teacher should be able to see every student's current course, last activity, and recent work from one screen.

Elective Genius is built around that. Each school gets a supervisor dashboard that shows live student progress, rubric grading on assignments, and student work the teacher can open and read. Students work through 31 high school courses across six career pathways (Healthcare, Business & Finance, Technology, Law & Society, Creative & Communication, and Life & Career Readiness), each a full semester elective worth 0.5 credit, with Meri, an AI tutor, inside every lesson. Grades 6–8 have 24 shorter exploratory modules.

School pricing is $149 per student per year, $129 at 25 or more students, and $109 at 50 or more. The first ten founding schools pay $99 per student in year one. See current pricing or browse the pathways. If you are weighing any vendor against these measures, my checklist on how a head of school evaluates an online curriculum vendor covers the questions to ask before you sign.

Frequently asked

How do you evaluate an elective program? Decide what success looks like before the semester, then track five things: whether students start, whether they keep working, whether the work is real, whether the supervising teacher trusts the program, and whether students choose another elective next term.

What is the most important measure of an elective program? The quality of student work. Enrollment and completion can look healthy while students learn very little. Reading a few samples every couple of weeks is the most reliable check a principal has.

How often should a principal review elective program data? Weekly for activity, every two weeks for work samples, monthly for the supervising teacher's check-in, and once at semester's end for the board.

Is completion rate a good measure of an online course? It is useful but incomplete. It arrives late, and it can count a student as finished who did not engage with the material. Pair it with work samples.

What should we do if the program is not working? Look first at setup: course assignment, schedule placement, and the supervising teacher's role. Most early failures are setup problems, and most of them can be fixed mid-semester.

About the author

Steve Smith is the founder of Elective Genius and spent 25 years in education before building it. He also runs Rosedale Christian Academy, where every middle- and high-school student uses the platform, which means every measure in this post gets applied to his own students first. Reach him at schools@electivegenius.com.

Start your pilot

Spring schedules get built in November. If you add electives in January, decide now what "working" will mean, and run one semester against that bar. You will know by May whether to expand.

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