AP exam season has ended, and many students are wondering whether a single-digit number is worth the exorbitant fees and countless hours of studying to take a test. The mastermind behind all of these AP tests is College Board. College Board has a monopoly controlling standardized tests, like the SAT, and ways to get college credit, such as AP exams. However benign it may seem, College Board does not exist to help students.
Much of what College Board offers seems tempting: the ability to pursue higher education, or perhaps, a boost in one’s college application. But in fact, College Board is not for students; it’s for schools. Is it easier to place the most value in the carefully reviewed parts of a college application, or look at a few numbers given to you by your friendly neighborhood College Board? And isn’t it even more efficient to plug those neat numbers into an algorithm, so you don’t have to use as much time and resources reading applications? Colleges do take other information into account, but the SAT is still a large factor in their decision-making.
Yes, College Board is useful, but it also unnecessarily takes students’ money. Why else would taking a three-hour exam cost $94? And to compound the fact that AP tests cost a lot of money, it costs even more money to send a single-digit number to a college of your choosing. But who can blame them? After all, it’s extremely costly to send an entire single number between computers in this day and age. And they’re doing the best they can by paying their CEO, David Coleman, only 750,000 dollars per year. For a not-for-profit, College Board is taking in an awful lot of money.
College Board also sells students’ information for less than two quarters. Your age, gender, and test scores are available to anyone willing to pay 43 cents. Some uptakers on this are JAMRIS, a military recruitment program, and the Student Search Service, a service that sends colleges information for selective advertising. Unsuspecting test takers are not sufficiently made aware of how their data is being used.
Finally, even at the cost of almost a hundred dollars, your test, for which you’ve put in blood, sweat, and tears, may not even be judged fairly. An MIT study found that there was a direct correlation between scores and essay length. The length of a piece of writing has no say on its quality and a rambling three page essay may be much worse than a succinct and well-written one-page essay. The professor, Les Perelman, found that he could guess the score of an essay by its length a whopping 90 percent of the time. He then reviewed the actual essays and found several factual inaccuracies in those that received high scores.
Unfortunately, going through College Board at least once in one’s education is pretty much inevitable. If not through AP classes, then through the SAT subject tests, which many colleges require. College Board and its strangling grip on the education system is unavoidable. And unless it’s somehow stopped, its monopoly will stay and continue to be detrimental for students.