I know a lot of kids look forward to their exit interviews as if they were the light at the end of the tunnel of their high school careers, the metaphorical pearly gates of Ramaz. It’s really not uncommon to hear “I’m gonna talk all about this [expletive] at my exit interview, you’ll see,” or “I can’t wait to give them a piece of my mind at that exit interview.” Some students have this image of their exit interview being not unlike a Catholic confession, with the confessor seated comfortably behind a wall of anonymity and immediately absolved of anything they say when they’re gone. Others picture themselves waltzing into the sixth floor office with all the swagger of Superman, ready to rain holy hell onto anyone who wronged them over their four years. Neither is accurate.

The senior exit interview is meant to help the school figure out what they did right and wrong throughout the last four years. If patterns of complaints show up through multiple interviews, the school meets to discuss the problem and ways to fix it. If many students say that something was done right, the school makes sure to continue doing said behavior. So there’s a real, actual importance to the students giving honest advice.

Here’s the catch: students simply won’t do that if they’re paired with a teacher with whom they are not comfortable. Currently, students are assigned random teachers, so it goes one of three ways: either the students have a great relationship with the teacher, or they don’t know the teacher at all and don’t want to talk about personal things with them, or they have a negative relationship with that particular faculty member. I got lucky; I got a teacher I knew well and was willing to discuss my Ramaz experience openly. However, many of my friends were paired with the second and third types of teacher, and didn’t end up giving honest accounts. This is only a disservice to the school, which really needs its seniors to serve as human Yelps.

In order to fix this problem, I propose that the school have a “teacher request form” in which students are given a roster of teachers giving exit interviews and rank their first through third choices. The grade dean can then match students with their exit interviewers, creating a more sensitive and practical system which can only benefit every party involved.