The College Board is playing all of us.
If you have taken the PSAT, SAT, or taken any AP class/exam you have fallen victim to the College Board and its nonsense.
As a high school student, it is virtually impossible to avoid the College Board. At many public high schools, including H-F, it is hard to avoid taking AP classes because if you want to have a competitive class rank and GPA for college, raking up those AP classes are essential. Thus making AP classes attractive to students and driving students to take them.
At the end of the school year, students across the country who take AP classes take an exam to see if they will be able to use that AP class as college credit.
The current rate for a H-F student to take a single AP exam is $85, but according to the College Board website their price is $93. As of 2018, 4.22 million students took an AP exam which meant that The College Board earned roughly $392,400,062 strictly off of those exams.
Unfortunately, the only competitor The College Board has is the International Baccalaureate (IB), but they are barely a competitor. As of 2017 there were 4,650 IB schools in the country and almost every high school in the country offers at least four AP classes. Also, there are no requirements to take an AP classes, but you must test into the IB program, making it unaccessible for all students.
Along with AP classes/exams, The College Board also administers the SAT. The SAT has one other competitor which is the ACT.
Nearly 2.2 million students took the SAT in 2019 compared to the 1.8 million students who took the ACT.
Along with the AP exams there are costs to taking the SAT. In April, the SAT is free to all juniors to take, but if you want to improve your score you have to pay and take the test on a Saturday morning. It costs $47.50 to take the SAT without writing and $64.50 to take with writing .
If every student who took the SAT in 2019 and took it without writing, the College Board would have made $104,500,00, giving the College Board millions in profit in one year.
Essentially, the College Board controls the entire standardized testing playing field, making it hard for other tests like ACT to compete.
The College Board and SAT won a multi-million dollar contract with the state of Illinois to have all public schools in the state administer the PSAT and SAT two times a year, making it a requirement for all students to take it.
This one organization has the power to control the entire standardized testing field and we are just sitting back and watching them. We need to stop the College Board from profiting off of high school students trying to get into college.
There is no single solution to this problem, but we start with recognizing that if a not-for-profit pays their top executives hundreds of thousands of dollars and profits millions of dollars off of testing, then they are not a not-for-profit. They are a business and we need to stop being taken advantage of.