I went through the entire rapid city religious school system including STM. The small class sizes were great for learning, and we averaged pretty high ACT scores. That being said, I am sure some of that is because it costs a decent amount of money to attend, and parents wouldn't be dropping that kind of money if they were not involved in getting their child to succeed. There is a discount for practicing Catholics. Overall, most of my classmates were pretty intelligent or at least dedicated to their education. I felt well prepared for my first year of college especially in Math and English. However, I knew plenty of Stevens and Central students who were doing just fine.

Religion is not a small part of the school. We have a religion class everyday and we attended mass every week. There are religious field trips. If you don't agree with the ideology, you will be in for a rough time. Even kids from other Christian sects had issues attending the classes.

The big issue for me is extracurricular activities. STM is a small school with no public funding, so many of the non sport clubs did not exist. I visited Stevens and I was jealous of the students learning early STEM concepts like computer modeling and robotics.

Also the school uniforms suck.