Frustrations of an AP Student

It’s over.

The week every high schooler dreads from the moment they set foot in our under renovated building – AP testing week. Fourteen days of grueling Scantron bubble sheets, saran wrapped testing booklets, four-hour sleep nights and far too much Netflix for a healthy person to watch. This past Friday our high school took one collective sigh of relief as the last testing booklet was collected.

The recent barrage of AP testing seems to have left most of my class mates with baggy eyes, slumped shoulders, and battle stories of terrible testing proctors and miss printed Student ID codes. In the flurry of No. 2 pencils, I can’t help but itch the familiar question of why we subject ourselves to this torture in the first place. Since when did education become this painful?

*WARNING: Rant Mode ahead*

Behind all of the tests, grades, and other numbers assigned to our mental activity, schools are striving to help each student to realize their full potential for intellectual growth. Curiosity and the willingness to pursue knowledge are what have fueled our species from its very inception – from the cave man who first wondered what would happen if he hit a flint stone over a few twigs. As humans, our cranium is what separates us from ever other living, breathing animal on the planet. And with such awesome power comes the need to learn how to use it. Tapping into each of our individual learning styles and ways of growth is hard – that’s why we have education.

Ever since the beginning of group-taught education, educators have been trying to find an answer to how to evaluate this learning process. Every student responds differently to varying forms of testing, so how it possible practically to test each individual using their unique learning style to confirm that they are growing as learners and scholars? To this end, a complex web of standardized tests and exam guidelines and procedures have been devise, ultimately leaving students out of breath and without of true intellectual growth.

It seems to me that we have become so obsessed with the evaluation stage of learning that we have begun to lose sight of the real point of education. In an attempt to qualify the unqualifiable, we have invented a whole new genre of mental torture – hastily stuffing each uniquely sculpted mind into one squared shaped box, ignoring the bruises, bleeding, and cries for help. Not only are we drowning ourselves in the voices of those students who are lost in translation, but in the frustrated calls of those who are yearning to move ahead. Instead of helping educators get an idea of the progress of their students, our brave new world of standardized testing is hindering and frustrating the students themselves. We, the students, are forced to sit through hours of grueling evaluations which, for most of us, are not formatted in ways that fit our learning process. Multiple choice tests? I might not be able to pick B from four options (because you, dear test writer, have worded the question in a way I don’t agree with), but I can show you the exact same information in oral format.

Is this really what we meant for education to be centered around? Is this really what we want for our future minds? If all we are learning is how to put a letter from a four option multiple choice, how can we expect ourselves to progress? Finding answers to bettering education is difficult, and we don’t pretend to have fool-proof solutions. The only thing we know now is that our current system isn’t working, and we desperately need one that does.

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