Melanie didn't need to pass a final exam to prove that her civics class had taught her a ton about effective political organizing. Through an alternative year-end evaluation, Melanie, a junior at Metropolitan Business Academy, read excerpts from a research paper and talked about the skills she’d picked up in writing it — a self-assessment that her teacher argued gave a better sense of her growth than a single test could ever measure. In a trend that’s taking hold across Metro