Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: College Board, SATs, and why I avoid AP classes if I can help it.
Full disclosure y’all, I’ve tried to write this episode like three times already, but I just wasn’t feeling inspired about it. Today it feels good though.
First things first: what is College Board? College Board, the company, was founded in 1899 and its original purpose was to make higher education more accessible. Its name would have you think that it is a collection of colleges, or perhaps a group of people who are connected to colleges, but that isn’t quite it. College Board creates a system of standardized testing, entrance exams, curriculums, and financial aid profiles that can be applied broadly to many high schools and colleges. This standardizes the admissions and education processes a little more, which is useful. Let’s go through each of the things College Board does, because like any successful company, it does way, way more than you would ever think.
Let’s start with the SATs. The SAT is a long, standardized exam given to high schoolers as one of those big important test scores they send to colleges and universities so they can decide whether we get to give them money or not. I think it was originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the Scholastic Assessment Test, or something, but it doesn’t really matter because now it doesn’t mean anything and it’s just the SAT. It’s different every year, but the vibes are the same. There’s two math sections (one with a calculator, and one without), a reading section, and a writing/grammar section. There’s also an essay with some of the tests that you can sign up to take, but it isn’t required. It’s generally assumed that every high schooler will take the SAT at some point, and some may take it several times. Some colleges require SAT scores to apply. Oh, did I mention? The test costs $49.50 without the essay and $64.50 with the essay.
Let’s move on, shall we? College Board offers a scored practice test for the SAT, called the PSAT. I assume that means Practice SAT, but let me Google that… I was wrong! It means Preliminary SAT, because why not. There are several versions of the PSAT, depending on what grade you’re in. The one for juniors, the PSAT/NMSQT, lets you qualify for the National Merit Scholarship. Well, “lets you” is not the right phrase. The scoring requirements are murky at best, and only like 8,000 or so students actually get a scholarship from it. Basically, once I read the fine print on my “qualifying” letter where it said they’d tell me if I was a “semifinalist” in a year, I stopped caring about that scholarship. I’ll pass, College Board. The PSAT costs $17 to take.
Ah, lovely. It’s time to talk about AP classes. AP stands for Advanced Placement, and it’s a system designed to offer college credit to high schoolers for free, or at least a very, very reduced cost than actually taking the classes at college. The students are taught more rigorous curriculums that College Board designs, and then are tested on it at the end of the year in a long exam to determine their score on a 1-5 scale. Each college or university decides whether to accept AP test scores as credit hours, and no college accepts scores of 1 or 2. How do you pass, or get a 3? Nobody knows! It’s different for each class, I think. AP exams cost $94 each, and if you register for an exam but decide not to take it, that’s an extra $40 as a cancellation fee. Or, you do what I did, and fight the system and the teachers and the guidance counselors and refuse to register for the tests you don’t want to take, even if it meant I couldn’t do some of the assignments for the class.
You see, there’s this new program from College Board called AP Classroom where teachers can assign practice tests and other assignments that are closer to what may actually be on the AP exams. Except you can’t access AP Classroom for a specific course if you aren’t registered for the exam, which, remember, costs $94. In my state, the exam fees are paid for by the state government, but not the cancellation fees, and the money still comes out of the state budget that could be spent on other things.
Yes, fee waivers for College Board tests are available, and honestly are fairly easy to get. However, it has been stated by College Board themselves that test practice and tutoring provide a significant score boost (but only with their own test prep programs). Yeah, College Board, we know that studying improves test scores. Not everybody can afford tutors or the new SAT prep books that come out every year. And when I say every year, I mean every year. For example, my sister took AP Environmental Science in 2019 and bought the exam prep book. I took it the following year and used the same book to study, but you can bet there were plenty of AP Environmental Science 2020 books for me to pick from if I had chosen to do that. Not that any of them could have been much use, given the AP situation in 2020, but we’ll get into that a bit later.
I think I should also mention that College Board is a not-for-profit organization. No, I don’t mean “non-profit.” A “not-for-profit’ organization is one whose purpose is technically not to earn profits, and they are exempt from taxes by the government. In theory, that checks out. College Board wasn’t started to earn a profit, it was to standardize college admissions and provide better access to higher education. But then why are all of their programs so expensive? Why do they run such a wide variety of programs? Why do they aggressively advertise their program where you can apply to college directly through them when there are others that are more widely accepted? Because they want to make a profit. Business rhetoric is meant to trick you into believing that capitalism is morally good, and it is dangerously effective. Businesses are inherently amoral, having no morality, but because they want to turn a profit, it is in their best interest to convince you that they are God’s gift to humanity. Let there be no confusion here. College Board is a large commercial entity that does not pay taxes on the revenue it receives from teenagers.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that my tone has become steadily more distasteful as I’ve been talking about this. It’s time we get into why I refuse to take AP classes anymore.
First of all, I don’t believe that an AP class is comparable to a college class. At all. How could it be? The format of high school classes is drastically different from college classes, and even between high school, classes are different. My school is on a block schedule, so some people take a semester-long AP class in the fall and don’t take the exam until May. Some people take a year-long AP class, or two, that prevents them from taking the electives they want or need to take because of timing. Most of all, high schoolers are simply not learning the same way that college students are learning. Teachers are forced to take college-level material and shovel as much of it into us as they can before the semester runs out, using any methods they can think of to actually get teenagers to learn.
I cannot name an AP class that I have taken that I think has adequately taught me what a college course would teach me. That’s partially why I wouldn’t take the AP Psychology exam. I knew I would get a 5, because I did really well in the class, but I also knew that it would exempt me from the psychology class I needed for the major I was planning for, and I did not feel like I had a college level understanding of Psychology. So, no exam for me. I had to fight for it though. I was automatically registered for the exam, so I had to get a teacher to unregister me, since students couldn’t do it themselves (another thing I’m mad about. Give us our autonomy!). Every teacher and guidance counselor I talked to was so confused and couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to take an exam that I knew I would pass. Some of them blatantly refused. My reasoning was that I shouldn’t have to take an exam that I don’t want to take, regardless of whether I have a “good” reason or not. I didn’t want to take the test, and that should have been that.
I also think that AP classes place undue stress on high schoolers. There’s so much pressure to have the highest GPA, the highest class rank, the best test scores so you can even hope to get into the college of your dreams. It’s honestly sickening to me how they’ve turned our education into a competition. It’s ridiculous. So you take all of that stress and you slam down a class with college-level expectations, heavy workloads, and the stories of failure and sleepless nights, and you say, “have fun, score a 5!” At my school, AP Calculus is notoriously difficult, and nearly everyone struggles to the point of tears at some point during the class. And when this is brought up, all anyone does is shrug and say, “That’s just how calculus is.” Even the people in the class! And that confuses me, because why should that be how it is? Calculus is hard, yeah. So leave it to college! Why are we teaching 17 year olds calculus? How many of them actually need calculus before they finish high school? It’s just for the grade, the GPA boost, the little button to press on your college application that says “I took calculus!” I’m not in the business of making myself miserable for a couple extra GPA points. I don’t need calculus, I want to be a lawyer. But I am out of math classes to take, because they shove people who are good at math on a pathway to get them to calculus. So I’m taking AP Statistics. Hopefully, it’ll be helpful and won’t make me miserable. Hopefully, I’ll take it again in college like I’m supposed to and I’ll actually learn.
Nobody needs more complaining about how online school in spring 2020 went, so I’ll make this quick. The online AP testing was a fiasco. Some people couldn’t submit their tests, some people couldn’t log on, some people didn’t have internet or technology accessible and couldn’t take their tests. Not to mention that content got cut way short. This is sort of a mini-conspiracy theory, so don’t quote me on this, but I suspect that the grading was also a disaster. I saw people on Twitter saying that they wrote like a sentence for an AP Language essay and got a 5, and other people saying they had been super confident but ended up with a 2. People who usually get one score got weird range, and people like me who were not confident at all about certain tests did better than they think they deserved. Nobody knows what the grading was like last year. College Board doesn’t give you any feedback, so there’s no way to ever know.
Long story short, I don’t take AP classes anymore unless there are literally no other options. I recognize that this is a privileged experience, and the way they have taken over college admissions makes it so that some people really feel like they need good SAT scores and good AP scores to get into the college they want. Speaking from my place of privilege, whether I want to be or not, College Board is my sworn nemesis.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. You can find me @FastFactsPod on Twitter, so feel free to tweet me anything you want to hear about. This is Callie, signing off.
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