Have you ever felt like you weren’t living up to the expectations of  those around you? Maybe felt that you aren’t as advanced as your friends or family members? Perhaps you Were swapping stories at Thanksgiving dinner with your cousins and suddenly feared that you weren’t as smart as they are? Don’t worry, this post is not meant to give you PTSD or send you into an existential crisis. This test is all about America’s ego and FOMO : The Advanced Placement Tests.

The idea for the AP program rose in the 1950s right before the Cold War began when policymakers feared that current high school students were unprepared for college and graduate school. As each fresh crop of 18-21 year olds continued to graduate, the government was nervous that the educated young men whom had helped to defeat the soviet union may be the last of their kind, and with a possible war unfolding, lawmakers decided that a new type of program and test needed to be invented, one that assured them that teenagers were just as challenged and intelligent as their successors. And so, with the government’s support for a more rigorous schooling process before moving on to college, the Ford Foundation created the Fund for the Advancement of Education (FAE) in 1951.

In order to get a better understanding of where some of the best and brightest were on the scale of preparedness for college, 58 alumni of the three most prestigious prep schools (Andover, Lawrenceville, and Exeter) were all sent surveys by the FAE asking if they felt that their “high school” had prepared them enough for the universities they were currently attending (Yale, Harvard, and Princeton). To sum up most of their responses, they indicated that had they been able to take more advanced classes in prep school, they feel that they would have been able to learn more in college instead of essentially repeating the same information from their senior year. 

During this same time period, the FAE was already working on implementing more rigorous courses into high schools across the country, advertising them as “college-level curriculum” for high school students. After combining forces with the team which sent out the surveys, the FAE launched the Advanced Placement Program into 27 schools, giving the first AP tests in 1954. The guinea pig class scored extremely well on these tests compared to college students taking the same courses at university. With its success, AP began administering 10 tests annually in 1956 (Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English Composition, Literature, French, German, Spanish, and Latin).

In 1955, College Board, the master of standardized tests, took over the Advanced Placement Program. Initially under their direction, the tests were never longer than 3 hours and cost $10 to take as many as you would like (kinda like a buffet, but for knowledge). Even though $10 dollars sounds like an amazing deal today, keep in mind that this was in 1955, the equivalent today would be about $100. However, this was $10(0) dollars to take as many or as little of the AP tests as you wanted, you could take all 10 or just two, the cost was the same. Today, each test costs $126 to take individually, even with Financial aid it still hovers around $60. 

Unfortunately, the high cost of the test isn’t the only downside to the AP courses/exams. While 60% of American High Schools offer AP classes, the variety of these classes are inconsistent, not to mention that 40% of schools don’t offer any.  We as Schreyer’s students were asked about fairness in education for one of our entrance essays, and I wrote about this very subject. Here is a short excerpt of what I wrote then and what still still stands true today: “Fairness in education should not be measured by equal treatment; it should be measured by equal opportunity. In so many situations, people are not provided with the same opportunities as others simply because of where they live. For example, my cousin lives much closer to the nation’s capital and is provided additional educational opportunities that I am not. She has completed two AP classes as a sophomore and four as a junior in a school that offered 16 courses, classes that my school in rural Pennsylvania did not offer. As a senior, I have completed five AP classes because only six are offered from my high school. Both my cousin and I are extremely successful and are in the top ten of our classes. However, we may not be evaluated equally since we have not been offered the same number of AP courses in high school.” 

However, even though I mention that I, as a rural Pennsylvania student, do not have access to the same education as my cousin, I do realize that I am very lucky to have been even offered those 6 courses, unlike most African American and Latino high school students. In a study done by The Education Trust, it was discovered that while Black students make up 15% of high schoolers, only 9% of the total students enrolled in at least one AP class are African American. Similarly, Latino Students account for almost 25% of the nation’s high school students, with only 21% of Ap students being Latino. For comparison, white students account for 50% of AP students and 54% of scores of 3 or higher, with only 5% of Black Students earning a 3 or higher in the same subjects. 

Without getting too much into some of the unfortunate systematic racism still implemented into our education system today, AP courses have been proven to help advance the education of any student who scores a decent score on the exams, either as a college credit or if it just serves as a “practice run” for college courses these students may take in the future. Even though these classes and exams were designed to see if all advanced high school students were still “up to the challenge” set by the generations prior, these tests have not only exposed certain areas that we as a nation are rather lackluster in our understanding in, but also that our country still struggles to provide equal opportunity to people of all backgrounds. 

References

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/02/11/more-students-earn-3-advanced-placement-exams-racial-gaps-remain#:~:text=Native%20Hawaiian%2Fother%20Pacific%20Islander,on%20at%20least%20one%20exam.

Black and Latino Students Shut Out of Advanced Coursework Opportunities

https://blog.prepscholar.com/history-of-ap-classes-exams

https://www.jstor.org/stable/494439?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

PSSA’s 

If you attended middle school in Pennsylvania, the acronym “PSSA” is likely to bring up some sort of traumatic response. If you have never taken a PSSA, they are essentially the SAT for middle schoolers in Pennsylvania, but instead of the students receiving a score that potentially gets them into college, the school system they attended would receive more or less funding depending on how their overall student body performed on the test. I can remember being in 5th grade and asking my math teacher, “why do we need to know how to do it this way then?” after he explained that while there was an easier way to solve the problem we were doing, the PSSAs wanted us to complete the problem using this new technique. These same types of situations came up year after year in English class, science, and even history and social studies so we could practice our “response” skills.

As a scrawny 11 year-old, I didn’t truly understand the reason for the test, only that we were told to “get a good night’s sleep” that week, all of the fun posters in each of the classrooms were either taken down or covered up, and we received small cartons of juice and a greasy, pre-packaged muffin before heading to the testing rooms. But as we grew up, we got curious and soon found out that our scores determined the funding for the school that year; the better we did the more money we received. This became blatantly obvious when I was in 7th grade and our principal came into Honors English 7 and gave us all a speech on how “he believed in us” and that “we could make our school proud” by doing our very best on the upcoming test. As it turns out, the previous year had not gone as well as the administration had hoped and were trying everything they could to increase our funding for the upcoming year. 

Almost every sentence in the two paragraphs above is a major red flag for our education system. Teaching to the test? Practicing our “response” skills? “Making our school proud” by what, getting more answers right than wrong?  Even though I could just blame it on my school in particular, this is a state-wide issue. Rather than truly teaching us the skills we need to perform well on the test, teachers are being strongly encouraged to simply teach students to be good test-takers. This is leaving us underprepared for the true world and lacking certain skills and knowledge that we need to be able to successfully contribute to society. Students learn how to determine what is the “right” answer quickly instead of learning how to think through the issue. And this behavior is only rewarded. My school had a pizza and ice cream party for anyone who received an “advanced” score on their PSSAs, even though all we had really done was learn how to answer how we were “supposed” to. We learned how to quickly memorize the information we needed for that week and then immediately forget it in order to make room for the next one. 

In 2004, Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO) led a series of studies on the Issues with the PSSAs and their recommendations on how to go about addressing some of them. Five main questions were addressed:

1. Does the PSSA adequately measure the academic content specified by the State Standards contained in Chapter 4? 
2. Are the PSSA tests internally consistent and replicable?
3. Does the PSSA produce results that support decisions required by Chapter 4 regulations? These include a determination of whether a student has demonstrated proficiency in meeting State academic standards in reading, writing, and mathematics; the award of a State certificate of proficiency or distinction; etc. 
4. Do the scores produced by PSSA correlate positively and significantly with pertinent scores produced on related tests such as Terra Nova, Stanford Achievement Test, etc.? 
5. Were the methodologies used to determine performance levels (cut scores) reasonable and technically competent? 

In their findings, HumRRO essentially called out each individually problem with the test, mentioning problems with discrimination, degree of difficulty, and academic standards. Their recommendations are as follows:

• A closer examination of testing materials and the degree of difficulty within each task, multiple-choice or performance based (essay/short answer)
• Possible action if not every academic standard was tested 
• Taking a closer look at whether or not the scores of a student accurately reflect them
• Re-examining the relationships of certain companies and how they affect the test
• Continuing to hold scorers accountable with a reliable system. 

If you are interested in reading the entire report, click here.

All of this essentially means that students and parents are in the right to believe that the PSSA’s and other tests alike are not fair, equal, or by any means an accurate evaluation of their child’s intelligence level or ability to do well in school or the outside world. Albert Einstein was one of the first people to accurately describe the American Education system with this quote: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend the rest of its life thinking it’s stupid.”  The PSSAs teach middle school children that they are only worth the number they get back, and those with higher scores are those who will be successful.this is drastic on such an impressionable mind and had been proven to shape a student’s self-worth and image of themselves from as young as 5th grade. Educators spend so much time and energy on these tests that are only damaging to student’s mental state and confidence, teaching to the material on the test rather than teaching students how to learn, how to be engaged, and how to educate themselves on something that interests them. Instead, kids are learning that higher scores mean that you are worth more time, more energy and more effort. Even though we have addressed the possible benefits of the SAT, it is truly difficult to find any with the PSSA. Hopefully, these tests can either be improved or eradicated for future students and their ability to learn rather than memorize.

Resources 

https://thetartan.org/2013/4/15/forum/pssa

https://www.stateboard.education.pa.gov/Documents/Research%20Reports%20and%20Studies/PSSAIssues.pdf

The SAT’s. A supposedly equal, fair assessment of high school students from every corner of the United States. While this test was designed with equal education and treatment of all American high schoolers, it has more recently been a heated topic across the nation on whether or not this idea is being properly executed. Before we dive into the controversy of standardized testing and how some of these problems could be addressed, let’s take a look at some of the history of them. 

In 1890, Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard University proposed “a cooperative system of common entrance examinations that would be acceptable to colleges and professional schools throughout the country, in lieu of the separate examinations given by each school” (NEA). Before his proposition, testing in America was very inconsistent, with each school having their own methods and standards. As one of the most prestigious universities in the country, Harvard was looking for a better way to find students that met their standards for admission, and a nation-wide, nation-regulated test to all willing students seemed to be the answer. Over the next several years, many people worked to develop a standard exam that would show the readiness of a student for the intensity of a college education. At first, these tests were based more on achievement, which classes the student had taken and how they could apply that knowledge to a standard exam, sort of like an AP test. 

However, the subjects on this exam were the same for everyone, whether the student came from an upper class family with private tutors that had studied all of the subjects (math, english, foreign language) or if they had grown up in a poor community with an even poorer education. Some sources say that the SAT was developed as a way to register the “competition” of the large wave of immigration into the United States on an intelligence level. American Scholars knew that not every immigrant was an “asset” to them, but they needed to sort out which ones could be. 

 In 1901, the College Entrance Examination Board administered the first tests, originally quizzing participants on 9 different subjects. Over the next 30 years, quantifying and regulating intelligence became the focus of the education system. 400 tests, ranging from math to foreign language, circulated around the United States, gaining massive popularity especially when the U.S. army created their own version (Army Mental Tests) to test new recruits for which jobs they would take during their service. Standardized Intelligence Tests were achieving the very thing they sought out to do, find the “special” people among the masses of the average. Within that they could sort those “special” people into smaller categories of special, were they better at math or english? More empathetic or systematic? Standard exams of intelligence became one of the hottest trends in education, with everyone wanting to discover where they laid on the scale. 

However, even by 1922 there were many concerns regarding the effectiveness of these tests and how they would impact our views as a society. John Dewy, a famous philosopher with no relation to the creator of the Dewey Decimal System said “Our mechanical, industrialized civilization is concerned with averages, with percents. The mental habit which reflects this social scene subordinates education and social arrangements based on averaged gross inferiorities and superiorities” (NEA).

Dewy, along with many others, was concerned that quantifying our intelligence would actually limit it. We couldn’t evolve as a society if we were constantly gatekeeping a good education based on a number that could determine the rest of your life.  Needless to say, his words and others alike were unable to stop the booming business of quantifying intelligence. Today, the SAT is the most popular standardized test, with over 60% of all colleges and universities in the United States saying SAT scores are of “Considerable importance” in the college admissions process. While the idea behind the SAT may be to equalize education opportunities and to find where some students may be stronger in some subjects rather than others, the SAT still has many, many flaws. So why is it still so highly regarded across the country? 

Diving into the flaws of standardized testing is a bit of an impossible task, from the advantages privileged to upper class students whom have more access to resources and torturing, to learning disabilities and test anxiety which can impact a students performance by up to 40%.  One of the main issues people have with the SAT test is it’s seemingly biased grading system. According to the American Education Finance and Policy, “Men outscore women by an average of 37 points on the math section, and 7 points on the reading section. Asian students score the highest on average, with white students trailing them by 22 points on average, and black and hispanic students trailing white students by an average of 50 points. Finally, students who receive need based aid score an average of 20 points lower on both sections of the test.” Even though the College board and SAT’s have an extensive process to screen for possibly biased questions, each race and gender seems to succeed (or not) in their own field. Students are often told that Standardized Tests are “trying to trick you”, but what if they aren’t trying to trick anyone at all, they just happen to use questions that are more tuned towards the white male’s thought process. I understand that this is a very large statement, yet it’s possible to be true. There aren’t always cruel intentions in bad outcomes, but the bad outcomes happen nonetheless. 

The test itself presents a number of issues, from possibly biased questions to the wealth gap that may act as a barrier to some lower-class students, but finding the problems with the SAT is the easy part; the hard part is addressing and/or solving them. How can we solve the gatekeeping that began before our country was even officially a nation? If the test was originally designed to “sort out” the immigrants that were “worth the time” of scholars, how to re remove that systematic racism from our nation’s mind? The answer is: we can’t. 

However, we can take steps to fixing some of the smaller issues of Standardized Testing before we solve prejudice.  Maybe the answer is better access/free SAT prep courses for lower-class communities to better prepare them where their high school’s may not be able to. The answer could be to drop the fees attached to the tests that could prevent these same students from even taking the test, thus blocking their chances at certain colleges. In my opinion, the answer really lies towards the beginning of this dive into education standards, and that is to stop quantifying intelligence. If the SAT’s held less weight in our admissions process to colleges and Universities, people whom the test was designed for would have less of an advantage over those who are fighting an uphill battle. Plenty of prestigious schools have lessened the weight of SAT’s in the admission process, maybe that can be the next nation-wide hype in education.

Recourses

nea.org/professional-excellence/student-engagement/tools-tips/history-standardized-testing-united-states

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/views/2020/08/17/history-sat-reflects-systemic-racism-opinion

https://www.universitystar.com/opinions/columns/the-sat-is-unfair-and-shouldn-t-decide-college-admissions/article_05e0c319-0afe-5caf-83a0-9563cda51cef.html

Are the SATs Biased?

Civic Issues category test