I reside in Northern California, however I’m touring to Texas to take the SAT on Saturday.
It’s not as a consequence of lack of planning on my half. I went on the School Board website to register for the June SAT the primary hour of the primary day that college students might join. However inside minutes, all of the seats in my county and throughout Northern California have been gone. Registering for the SAT within the Bay Space is as tough as snagging tickets to a Taylor Swift live performance.
I’m not the one one in California going to extremes to discover a place to take a school entrance examination. One mother in my neighborhood posted on her Fb web page, “It took two months of effort and three calls into ACT to get a spot that’s over 100 miles away!” Different California households joined the dialog explaining: “Identical factor in SoCal. Final 12 months we needed to drive 100 miles for an 8AM take a look at so we spent the evening… so irritating.”
I do know SAT and ACT checks are controversial. I’m not right here to debate whether or not they need to exist. The actual fact is, they nonetheless matter whether or not we prefer it or not. Because it stands for the 2025 faculty software cycle, solely 4% of four-year schools are take a look at blind, that means they don’t settle for take a look at scores. Most colleges (87%) are test-optional (a.ok.a. test-preferred) and the remaining 9% are test-required, in response to Fairtest. If an excellent take a look at rating might probably enhance my possibilities of getting accepted to 96% of four-year schools, I would like entry to that take a look at. And so long as most schools are test-optional, these exams must be available to all highschool college students.
So sure, I’m touring 1,800 miles to take the SAT . (We selected Dallas as a result of they’d plenty of seats obtainable and low cost flights.) Having dad and mom with the monetary means and the flexibleness of their work schedules to get me to a testing website far from residence is a bonus many others don’t have. The dearth of testing websites in California is not only an inconvenience, it’s an fairness concern.
California college students who can’t take the take a look at due to lack of entry will miss out on admission alternatives to some schools and to scholarships that contemplate or require SAT/ACT scores of their choices. For a lot of college students, particularly these from low-income households, this might imply shedding out on support that might make faculty inexpensive.
Lack of ample testing websites appears to be particularly problematic in Northern California. Wanting on the Aug. 24 SAT testing date demonstrates this. Should you’d searched the School Board web site earlier this week for testing facilities inside 100 miles of San Francisco, Dallas and New York Metropolis, you’d have discovered 103 testing websites within the New York space, 49 of which nonetheless had obtainable seats. Within the Dallas space there have been 69 testing websites and 65 of them nonetheless had availability. However within the Bay Space, there have been solely 12 testing websites they usually have been 100% booked for the August take a look at. In actual fact, the closest take a look at heart to San Francisco with availability was 405 miles away. This lack of entry places Northern California college students at a drawback.
California clearly wants extra testing websites. However I’d advocate for school entrance exams to be supplied to each highschool pupil at their very own faculty throughout a daily faculty day, as is completed with different standardized checks such because the California Evaluation of Pupil Efficiency and Progress.
After my household and others raised the difficulty of lack of accessible testing websites to our superintendent, our college district agreed to host an SAT Faculty Day in October. This may enable the scholars within the district to take the SAT at their faculty throughout common faculty hours. However change in a single faculty district is just not sufficient. College students and fogeys throughout California must demand extra testing websites at extra faculties in order that extra California children can pursue their faculty goals.
Sebastian Gillmore is a junior at Tamalpais Excessive Faculty within the San Francisco Bay Space.
