This article is from the November issue of Breezes. Pick up a copy and start reading today!

AP tests and college entrance exams are stressful for all of us, but have you considered the stress that these tests put on parents? While we pour over our workbooks, study guides, and Barron’s textbooks, the College Board, a “nonprofit” organization, makes an enormous income of over 62 million dollars. It has capitalized on the inflated importance of the SAT and AP tests and uses them to pick the pockets of its students. What do we get in return? Nothing more than our name and a number sent off to college.

The College Board’s original aim was to become a nonprofit organization whose sole purpose was to prepare students for their college and career lives. In recent years, however, this aim has been blurred by its leaders’ interests. The average nonprofit CEO earns just over one hundred thousand dollars a year, but George Coleman, the CEO of College Board, makes over 1.3 million. This money comes directly from students’ pockets, a price we must pay to achieve academic success.

The College Board’s mission statement claims that the organization’s purpose is to “ensure students are ready for college and career.” While this may be true for AP tests, standardized tests like the SAT do nothing to prepare students for their futures. They are merely a gauge for schools to determine how well students can take standardized tests. The College Board exaggerates the importance of the SAT and AP tests and reaps the benefits every time students fill in a bubble. The SAT is a direct violation of the College Board’s mission statement and is one of the many ways that they are exploiting students’ educations.

Many of the College Board’s problems stem from its situation as a monopoly. It alone controls the supply entrance exams and AP tests. This allows the College Board to freely expand its self-serving motives at the cost of America’s students. Past monopolies were dissolved by the government due to their unfair grip on certain industries, yet the College Board has its own rigid hold on education and nothing is being done. Why? Maybe it’s the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars it spends every year lobbying to prevent its own dissolution. The major problem is that this money for lobbying comes from the students, so the College Board can continue to cheat its students with their own money.

This sort of organization should not be allowed to continue, but the answer is not to boycott AP and SAT tests. The first step is to raise awareness of this seemingly innocent corporation’s faults. Eventually, all standardized tests should be issued by state departments of education, where hopefully they can be administered fairly.