The College Board: A Broken System

By. Stephen DeBisschop

Mar. 11, 2019

$1.56 trillion dollars is the U.S student loan debt, a number that is only increasing each year. This massive amount of debt is well known to students and causes a great amount of stress. The whole process of college admissions runs on stress and fear, getting accepted in the first place is difficult enough but when college debt and loans are added into the mix it makes things much more complicated. Fortunately for students scholarships and college credits can be earned while still in high school. Unfortunately for students much of this rests on the services provided by the college board.

Much of the college admissions process relies on the SAT score, the standardized test provided by the college board. Once upon a time the SAT stood for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but that is no longer the case. The SAT simply means SAT now, studies have shown that there is only a slight correlation between college success and high SAT scores. What the SAT best measures is the ability to take the SAT, and not “scholastic aptitude”. Curtis DeBisschop, a student at Northwestern University, does not believe the SAT to be a good indicator of college success in his own personal experience. As he points out math is half of the score on the exam, and this is the part he did poorly on in his SAT. in college so far he has hardly had to do any math and has been thriving. Mr. Buckingham, a science teacher at North puts it like this “All of these high stakes tests are a snapshot of how you are doing that day… I don’t think it’s representative of a student’s true abilities.” Another teacher at North, Ms. Kriz, disagrees. Ms. Kriz is noted by her colleagues as being very dedicated to her job, she believes the SAT is important because of the ways different schools grade, an A at North Quincy High may not be the same as an A at another school. This is a good point, colleges need an objective way to measure student’s abilities, but most of the evidence shows that the SAT just barely accomplishes this objective.

This, however, is far from the last of the SATs problems, and the other criticisms of the SAT and College Board are far more sinister. The SAT itself costs anywhere from forty to sixty-five dollars but there are fee waivers available for the costs of the exam itself. The College Board offers other side services for SAT, such as tutors and prep books. Fee waivers are not available for these, however, and this essentially allows better off students to buy better scores on the SAT, reinforcing the disadvantages lower income and minority students already face. This same problem applies to the other major service that the College Board provides, AP exams. Like the SAT, AP exams have practice books available, for a price, furthering the already present divide in education. The cost of the AP exam is often criticised as well. At a standard pricing an AP exam costs $94, a price that adds up quickly if you’re taking any more than one exam. For lower income students the price is reducible to $53, but that still very quickly adds up. And for what? Ms. Kriz has this problem with the AP exams, many colleges are no longer accepting them for course credits. Many institutions simply believe that the AP curriculum doesn’t cut it. A common criticism is that the courses are too packed with content and given too little time to truly understand and engage with the topics. Ms. Kriz and Mr. Buckingham both disagree with this view. They believe their courses cover a large amount of material but also have plenty of time for in depth discussions. Mr. Buckingham has had students visit him after starting college and say that their courses in college are easier than the AP classes they took in high school. Ms. Kriz finds the great amount of content to be helpful, it keep the class on focus and in other classes it may be too easy to get lost in these side discussions causing other parts of the curriculum to be rushed, if finished at all. This may be true at a school like North Quincy High, but in other areas, most often areas with high numbers of minorities, the schools may not be properly equipped or staffed to properly administer an AP course, but still offer them anyways. Curtis believes that the content covered in AP courses is good and covers much of the areas it should but the whole environment and way of teaching is different. College is a much different world from high school, your classes don’t meet every day and learning happens in a very different way. In this way he believes that AP courses are not good preparation for college and the only way to see how a student will succeed in college is to see them at college.

Already the many faults of the College Board should be clear, but that is far from all. The College Board is considered a non-profit but its current CEO David Coleman made $1,445,613 by the 2016 tax year, after taking the job in 2012. Under Coleman the College board faced a number of difficulties transitioning to its new CEO making numerous blunders in developing new AP curriculum and redesigning the SAT, but these errors are not malicious or deceptive, just unprofessional errors, but that’s not where things end. The College Board is an international business, it administers its programs all over the globe. The College Board has a high number of assets in the Caribbeans, more than it has in Asia or Europe, areas far greater in size in terms of both land and population. These assets in the Caribbean are listed as investments and partnerships, for profit ventures owned by the College Board. For years these assets likely did not pay taxes, but have been in recent years. The mismanagement mentioned earlier resulted in lots of financial difficulties for the College Board, and some of these assets made millions of dollars worth of charitable donations in those years. A donation to the College Board would be considered a charitable donation, of course.

This is far from all of the problems and suspicious activities related to the College Board. Many of their business practices are exceptionally aggressive for a non-profit, such as their bids for testing contracts in the Midwest. The College Board certainly serves a practical purpose in its ideals, but in practice it is a toxic and deceptive organisation. The stated mission of the College Board is to promote educational equality, but at this point it should be clear that it does anything but that. The College Board is considered a non-profit, and is an essential step in the college admissions process. In its current state neither of these should be true, things must change in some way, so what are we waiting for?

Image Credits: The College Board's YouTube

Works Cited:

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/ap-classes-are-a-scam/263456/#disqus_thread

https://patch.com/new-jersey/newbrunswick/bp--the-college-board-a-very-profitable-nonprofit

http://www.aetr.org/the-facts/collegeboard/

https://blog.prepscholar.com/does-sat-predict-your-college-success-and-future-income