Tag: SAT

  • Opinion: Canceled SAT

    This month, all of Long Beach Poly’s students were notified that the October 14 SAT was canceled. I believe this was the right move by the school, to place health before anything else, but I and a lot of my peers can’t help but feel that we are at a disadvantage. 

    As a senior, I have not taken the SAT and many of my peers have not taken it either. Even though many colleges and universities have made the SAT optional, the word optional makes it feel as if it is still something crucial. 

    Even before quarantine, the SAT was inaccessible and too time-consuming for students. While some students can splurge on tutors and prep books, other students only have access to YouTube and libraries that only contain books that are outdated and worn out.  Not only that, but the high price of the SAT was not designed for communities of lower socioeconomic status. Even with the fee waiver, it still does not account for the money needed for a tutor.

    When the best variable used to predict a high SAT score is high household income, there should be a red flag. Throughout my 17 years in America, the one thing I am most certain of is that institutions continue to marginalize and overlook poor communities. In addition, how do we know if the SAT is an effective way of measuring intelligence? It can’t possibly be that intelligence is constant because each student is unique and come from their own culture. Due to this rich diversity, each student is intelligent in their own ways, yet the SAT fails to take that into consideration.

    In the future, I can only hope that the SAT can change. That the SAT can become a test that doesn’t measure income but truly measures a child’s own individual intelligence and potential for success.

     

  • Educational Companies Have a Thing or Two to Learn

    In order to complete certain problems in the new Larson and Edwards calculus book, Calculus of Single Variable, the students in Poly’s most difficult math classes have to go to a buggy website that looks like it has not been updated since before Space Jam came out. This textbook was published and purchased this year.

    This is a pretty common trend in education companies. They skimp on updates and functionality and rely on their pseudo-monopolies to earn them money.

    The College Board is one of the most egregious examples. In order to get into a decent college, a student must take the SAT to demonstrate his intelligence. Poly pays for a student’s first PSAT and SAT, but beyond that the student is on his own to come up with the forty-five dollars (plus an additional twelve if his school of choice wants him to take the essay). Then, because it is their test, the College Board will also receive the revenue from this student’s preparations such as attending SAT tutoring sessions or purchasing an SAT study manual. Then, when the student receives the score he was hoping for, he pays twelve dollars to send the scores to each of the colleges to which he is applying. To clarify, that was twelve dollars per college.

    The same process applies to the APs, which are also College Board tests. At Poly, the fees for these tests are covered (except for the fifteen dollar deposit, ten of which is returned after the student takes his tests) but elsewhere they cost ninety-three dollars.

    So if the average American high school aged student takes a PSAT, an SAT, and one AP, she’s likely to be charged close to two-hundred dollars. All to the College Board for tests that frankly are not that great.

    But what alternatives do these poor students have?

    These problems in the education business are not confined to California. In a recent AskReddit thread where the question “Which major business would you like to see fail?” was posed, Pearson Education and the College Board were named almost as often as the infamous Comcast and loathed Time Warner. The issue has even been the subject of a twenty-minute rant on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. He railed against the spread of standardized tests and did his own version of the above rant with Pearson instead of the College Board. In California, we are lucky. We do not have to deal with that multi-headed hydra of terrible tests. In the states they control – I mean “operate in” – their tests are used for everything from kindergarten assessments to GED (adult education) credentials. And of course, like with the College Board in California, students prepare for all these tests with Pearson distributed materials.

    And these tests are awful. Multiple teachers have come out against them. One Florida educator by the name of Rick Roach took a test designed for tenth grade high school students and was labelled a poor reader, despite his multiple Masters Degrees. In Texas, a poet  found she was unable to answer questions about her own poems on a standardized test. It is a mess.

    And students are all but powerless in this situation.They just want to get to college, so they tolerate the crumby websites with poorly written code, crumby tests with poorly written questions, and crumby companies with poorly written morals. Maybe Mrs. Devos can do something about… oh, who am I kidding?