To older members of the school, the demerit policy that you know and love has been changed significantly over the past summer in order to better address our school’s motto of “Responsibility, Loyalty, and Consideration.” The major change from the past policy is the decrease in the amount of demerits before demerit hall becomes mandatory from a total of three to two demerits. For many, this change should not be very significant. But for the students who typically accumulated a large amount of demerits in the past, this change could be huge. Moreover, to address the problem of students claiming to be busy such that they could not go to demerit hall, the school changed the dates of the original demerit hall. Now, there is a demerit hall every other day throughout the week, invalidating most excuses.

Strikingly, the school, similar to the students, also found that these changes were severe, leading to a decrease on the limit of demerits awardable for any student’s bad actions. Now, could the students argue against these changes, asserting that the school has made their lives at US more problematic? Yes, but after speaking with Dr. Daughtrey, these questions seemed to have become inadequate. According to him, “These changes were made for the students to realize the consequences of their actions,” with the word “consequences” heavily stressed. Therefore, we as students should stop rebutting and instead follow the policy no matter how absurd the reason of the demerit.