BY JASON HELLERSTEIN
Enter to see rows and rows of pale, nervous prisoners scribbling furiously on desks placed in front of them. Close to you stands a man who towers over the prisoners, watching them with an almost sick detachment. It appears as if he has perhaps been torturing these people for days. You instinctively shiver at the thought of what’s been occurring in this room. Your heart fills with pity as your eyes glance quickly at each of the captives, hunched so close to the desks their eyelashes are almost grazing the surface. One of the hunchbacks is sweating profusely, one of them has a look of sheer terror on his face, one of them has his head down on the table in shame. The man paces back and forth. “Fifteen minutes,” he says. Fifteen minutes until what? What’s going to happen to these people?
Sounds like something from a horror movie, right? It’s actually a scene common throughout MHS during the first two weeks of May, when Advanced Placement exams are administered every year.
Advanced Placement exams (or “APs”, as they’re usually called) are College Board assessments that are designed to test the knowledge of students who have taken college-level courses during the year. They were originally created with the goal of accelerating a student’s path through college by enabling him or her to receive credit for work done in high school. Each AP is about three hours long and many, such as European History or English Language and Literature, involve strenuous two-hour-long essay sections. The tests are scored from one to five, with a five meaning a student is “extremely well qualified” to receive college credit for the course and a one earning the student “no recommendation.”
The tests have come under scrutiny in recent years, however, as colleges question whether AP tests and courses can truly replace college classes. Many colleges now limit the number of credits a student can earn from AP tests to two or fewer. This quota can be filled by many MHS students at the end of their junior year.
Yet, for some reason, our school still requires all students in AP classes to take the corresponding AP tests at the end of the year. As one administrator said, a student refusing to take the tests “just doesn’t happen.” This policy seems logical for juniors, who haven’t decided where they are going to college and could even use their scores to help their chances of admission. But at 87 dollars per test, they certainly aren’t cheap. And for seniors, who have learned of their college acceptances more than a month before testing, APs can feel like an incredible waste of time and money.
Administrators argue that requiring students to take AP tests at the end of an AP course keeps students motivated. The phrase I’ve heard thrown around is “student accountability.” Making the students take the tests keeps them serious in their classes through the end of the year. But what motivates most students are their grades, not their AP scores – particularly scores they can’t receive credit for. Senior year AP scores are not released until mid-July and have no impact on the college process. At MHS, the only way AP tests can hurt you is if you don’t take them, and the school punishes you.
Allowing students to choose which tests they take, however, might pose some logistical difficulties. According to College Board guidelines, the actual tests must be ordered by March 25 – six days before the day most college admissions results are released – so many students will not yet know where they are going to school the following year. But many would likely still choose to forgo the exams. College isn’t generally seen as something to rush through and getting thrown unprepared into higher-level courses doesn’t sound very appealing. It would be simple enough to send home a form in the middle of the year, to be filled out by students and their parents, asking which tests each student will choose to take.
If we lived in a state that paid for its students’ AP tests (like Florida), there wouldn’t be much for students to complain about (although there would be for taxpayers) – but we don’t and a public school should not be able to require students to pay hundreds of dollars for tests that will be entirely useless to them. It would be simple enough to have students fill out a form saying which tests they would like to take that May. If they don’t want college credit, it’s the students’ prerogative.
This community has an obsession with funding the College Board’s continued growth and prosperity. The process is pretty standard by now: take two or three SAT Subject Tests, take the PSATs twice, take the SATs at least once, take a few APs junior and senior year and then pay even more later on (an exorbitant charge of 10 dollars per score, per college) to send those scores to the schools you apply to. Even before the cost of any tutoring, the expenses are already in the hundreds of dollars. Eventually – if you’ve taken the necessary steps – you’ll end up accepted to a good college and might feel like the whole process was justified.
Unfortunately, the price paid for this process extends beyond finances. College Board tests and the preparation that goes into them can feel like a soul-crushing experience, a time-wasting system foisted on students while they should be learning – really learning. Spring used to be a season filled with hope and excitement; as a child, it was almost impossible not to feel the optimism inherent in blooming flowers and sunshine for the first time in months. But instead, as we’ve grown older, it’s become a time filled with the stress of SATs and APs.
Flowers may be in bloom, leaves may be reappearing on trees throughout the town, birds may be returning from their winters elsewhere, but juniors and seniors certainly won’t notice. Once you’ve been taught to tune out “distractions” such as warm weather and sunshine, it’s difficult to reverse the teaching, maybe even impossible. Yes, summer is just around the corner. But there’s nothing wrong with relieving the stress a little early, just once; we’ll have enough stress over the next four years. So, for now, instead of staring at a wall, bathed in a ghastly fluorescent glow, can’t we stare at the clouds, bathed in sunlight?
