High school graduation is an important lifetime milestone. One of the many things from which we graduate as high school is concluded is dealing with and pouring money into the College Board.

The College Board is the umbrella organization that administers many of the standardized tests used to compare students across the country and even around the world, including the Advance Placement tests and the SAT. According to its website, the College Board has one goal: "to ensure that every student has the opportunity to prepare for, enroll in and graduate from college." But, that "goal" is not what comes to mind when we think about the College Board.

According to its critices, a goal that College Board is more in tune with cries creating an economy revolving around college admissions. Its system gives an unfair advantage to students with the resources and money to perform better on exams that fail to test how well a student can think and learn.
This is especially true when it comes to the SAT exam.

According to the College Board's website, the SAT's were created around 1900 to create a universal way of determining if students were ready to take college courses. Today, it is not a way of measuring how prepared students are for college, but rather how prepared students are for the test itself.

The SAT is broken up into three sections: reading, writing and math. Each section supposedly tests your ability to think critically about the subject based on what you have learned in school. In reality, they test how well you know how to take the test, rather than your thinking abilities. The College Board even advertises "test-taking approaches" as one of the perks of buying its SAT study guide.

But high school students around the world may be in luck. Last fall, David Coleman became the new president of the College Board, and, according to The Washington Post, has many of his own issues himself with the SAT. He has criticized the vocabulary section, calling some of the words tested "irrelevant." Coleman's biggest criticism, according to the Post article, is with the essay portion of the writing section.

The article quotes Coleman as describing a conversation he had with a friend of his who tutors students in Hong Kong. Students often ask his friend where to get examples for the essay questions, to which she responds, "you know, it's the American way, you make them up." Coleman continued and implied that a better revision for the essay would be to provide evidence which test-takers can draw from. This is a more accurate method to evaluate whether students are prepared for college. Most, if not all, papers that students write in college synthesize and analyze evidence from outside sources to prove the central thesis.

According to the article, Coleman stated that "the real question is can we make a revision of SAT a victory for everyone-more aligned with what colleges need as well as better work for kids." Hopefully, this will become a reality.

But, this "everyone" Coleman refers to includes students, teachers and school administrators. It does not refer to the discrepancies between the socioeconomic statuses of the students taking the SAT and how that impacts how well they perform.

In addition to problems with the content of the SAT, there is the issue of how money plays a role in the success of students taking the SAT. If a student has the money, he or she can opt to take a class, hire a tutor and buy books specifically designed to teach him or her how to take the SAT. Affluent studentscan also take the SAT on multiple occasions to hopefully improve their score with each test. This can all add up to hundreds, and even thousands, of dollars.

Disregarding the extra options that can improve SAT scores, the test and grading are both pretty expensive. The actual SAT costs $50 to take each time. It's an additional $27 if you register late and an additional $26 if you change the date or location of the test. And, if you are in doubt of the scoring, you can pay $55 to have the multiple-choice section double-checked or the writing section double-checked. There are waivers for the cost of the SAT, but not for the extras that you can pay for, such as having scores sent to colleges earlier or having the test double-checked.

The cost of the resources and the test itself nullify the original motive of the test to be universal and equal for all college applicants.

The College Board needs to shift the SAT's focus away from money and change the content of the test, specifically the writing section. It needs to test if students are prepared for college in a context where each student can be equally evaluated regardless of his or her socioeconomic status. A new test should be designed to measure the student's knowledge and ability to think and analyze, rather than his or her ability to understand the anatomy of the SAT.
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