Upper School Academic Program

Our Upper School curriculum is designed to nurture curiosity and agency, while ensuring each of our students acquire the skills they need to be engaged citizens and successful academic thinkers.

For an in-depth look at the many classes our Upper School students take over the course of their academic career at Stone be sure to look at our 2023-2024 Course Selection Guide Right Here.

Graduation Requirements

Upper School students are required to complete all Pennsylvania State graduation requirements prior to receiving a diploma. Specific to Stone, in order to graduate students must complete:

Exhibition Work and Culminating Experiences 

We believe the final week of the school year should be reserved for grand exhibitions of cumulative skills acquisition from across the year or, in the case of Senior Defense, across an entire high school experience. Exhibition Week presentations capture our community’s most complex, interdisciplinary, and sophisticated work.  

Big Curiosity Quest (BCQ)

The BCQ is now one-Mod research course where students are asked to respond to a single, interdisciplinary question in the form of public presentation and exhibition of synthesis. This course requires an intentional practice of being curious, an emphasis on process, and the ability to unpack difficult concepts. Though the exhibition of BCQ work occurs in Mod 4 and not Exhibition Week, the presentations are still considered a grand exhibition of cumulative skills acquisition. 

Junior Workshop

The Junior Workshop is a two-Mod course for which eleventh-grade students create knowledge, insight, beauty or function by executing a project which arises out of their own passions. A Junior Workshop project requires significant research, but a student’s product may not be a report on this knowledge: they must bring something new into the world. During Exhibition Week, students must deliver a 15-minute presentation followed by a 15-minute Q&A from a Faculty Panel.

Senior Defense

Senior Defense is a significant research project that serves as a synthesis of learning, and the defense of a student’s academic and intellectual growth during their time at Stone. Senior Defense is different from a capstone project in that a student is given a personalized question to which they respond in depth. Pre-advising for the question takes place from October to December, questions are sent in March, and in June students must deliver their final response during a 30-minute presentation, defending their process and “product”, followed by a 30-minute Q&A with a Faculty Panel. The Senior Defense serves as a mechanism to polish and package four years of rich, complex academic work and to uncover the intellectual through-line of a student’s Upper School scholarship.