We’re one of the best, and we just keep getting better.

The Staples juniors continued to represent the amazing academic reputation Staples has by doing impressively well on the math section of the Connecticut Academic Performance Tests taken last March, beating the school record.

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t care about our record breaking achievement. Now whenever a school decides to talk trash to us, we will know exactly how to respond,” said Greg Salamone ’13.

Not only did the Staples juniors score the highest in school history, but these scores were the highest in the state.

“The way that CAPT is scored is in the percentage of kids that make goal, and this year, 90.2 percent of our students made goal,” said Frank Corbo, the Math Department Chair.

It’s no surprise that the math department is extremely proud of these students for using the skills they’ve learned and their best efforts to produce such a high score.

To reward the juniors, no homework was assigned during the week of March 5-9, which was of course, much appreciated.

“ I do not feel it was imperative to give us a week off of homework, but it was nice. I feel that rewards can help provoke success, especially for high schoolers, who are often swamped with homework,” said Salamone. “However in my opinion, I think they should have just granted us money.”

This was not the response from other students. Many sophomores and seniors are in the same classes, and they were assigned outside work as usual.

“I was pretty jealous when my math teacher made it clear that only half of the class would have to do the homework, and the juniors definitely did their part to rub it in each day,” said Brittany Silver ’14.

It may be assumed that not assigning homework may hinder the learning process on a certain topic for the students who do not have to be prepared for class. But most students found this to not be the case.

“That particular week, our class worked at a slower pace than usual. I let my teacher know that class should not be moving too fast if we had no incentive to do any homework, and he agreed,” Salamone said.

Don’t let them fool you- although they may be bragging about how nice it was to have a break from working hard, many juniors still did the work in order to maintain their grades.

“I actually found that a lot of them did the homework anyway, because we had an upcoming quiz that most of my classmates wanted to be prepared for,” said Silver.

Since the typical response from sophomores taking CAPT is that it is a test that doesn’t count towards their grades, hopefully this motivates future sophomores to do well and try their hardest to beat the new record.

It’s always important to keep continuing the prestigious legacy Staples has built over many years by proving just how smart and hard working the students are.

“Hearing about how great our school is never gets old,” said Salamone. “It’s good to see that Staples is advancing even further mathematically.”