As the month of May comes around to finish the school year, many seniors, juniors, and even some lucky sophomores find themselves at the mercy of the Advanced Placement tests. Despite the constant warnings and advisements from our teachers of the impending tests over the past few months, these few weeks in May seemed to have crept up on students as we are finding that the hundreds of hours we spent learning our subjects in countless classes has resulted in very little knowledge actually retained.
Luckily, most of us know that there is plenty of time to take crash courses on AP subjects the night before the test. As I have found from many late night study sessions, the Information Age of the internet comes as a gift and a curse for those who understand that while they do have the power to learn anything pertinent to their studies at the tips of their fingers, that information is equally balanced by episodes of Cops! and Judge Judy on YouTube, as well as hundreds of Facebook statuses and updates as AP and prom season simultaneously collide. One quickly comes to understand that websites like Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube will only act as dark holes to your invaluable time, of which you have very little. The discomfort and general insecurity felt by students who wake up from a six-hour study session and realize they spent five hours watching WWE’s Wrestlemania is almost indescribable.
Furthermore, to completely ensure that high schoolers never get to feel comfortable with their studies, many of the AP tests given by the College Board have been greatly changed or increased in difficulty. As a result, during this week students around the globe find themselves at a loss on what to be prepared for as Princeton Review and Barron’s Educational Books stocks climb record highs in an economic scheme so evil it can only have originated from the League of Shadows. Seriously, there is something undeniably shady about a massive “nonprofit” government association, which operates almost like any other big business, turning out preposterous multi-million dollar “surpluses” as a result of “substantial opportunity costs.”
In its inception, the Advanced Placement tests seemed like a good idea. Colleges needed some sort of nationwide baseline testing for students taking college courses to see if student had actually retained the material. However, these motives were blatantly twisted (especially in the past decade) when AP courses began to “teach the test,” courses started deviating from the legitimacy and difficulty of college courses, College Board made a market from test review materials, and the government began cramming money into the mouths of schools to provide AP classes, which their students in no way could be prepared for. Despite the sensibility of most human beings, the leaders in education at College Board continue to lobby representatives to encourage schools to expose students to the AP programs, even after new information has shown that as the number of students taking the tests has annually increased, the percentage of students who fail the test (or get “1’s”) has also dramatically increased. The insanity and corrupt nature of College Board’s current executives, nineteen of which have over $300,000 salaries for their work at a non-profit but constantly surplusing company, can easily be seen as deplorable.
However, due to the ever-increasing growth of College Board and the importance of displaying rigorous academic studies to colleges, we students are forced to suffer through and continue this self-sustaining cycle of senselessness as we begin to alter our daily sleep cycles, relinquish our social lives, and buckle down for the long haul in these two tiring weeks in May.