After paying about $800 on a SAT prep course during her junior year of high school, Allie Kauffmann’s score increased by a wide margin and helped improve her chances of getting into the country’s most prestigious universities. But while most college-bound students would be elated, Allie couldn’t help but feel as if she had been cheated. With the help of her father, a Boston University film professor Sam Kauffmann, she made a video to share her grievances and further enlighten the nation on the problems of standardized testing.
It worked. Kauffmann’s video has been featured on The Huffington Post and numerous other media outlets, revitalizing the age-old argument in a new way: regardless of whether or not standardized tests accurately measure intelligence, are they inherently biased? The most interesting point Allie makes – one that is often swept under the rug – is the fact that prep courses for the SAT and ACT are instrumental in improving one’s score. But they are only available to those who are financially comfortable.
The test prep business is a competitive one in which thousands of organizations compete – including big companies such as Kaplan, Princeton Review, CollegeBoard and local businesses such as Boston Test Prep – to win the confidence of high school students. Allie points out that Americans spend more than $1 billion on prep classes annually. This is not an insignificant component of the national economy and signifies the growing power of said companies. Meanwhile, the SAT and ACT enterprises continue to profit by means of millions of test takers, creating an environment in which people of poor socioeconomic status can’t break through the glass ceiling.
It’s a well-accepted fact that almost all forms of standardized testing have the potential to be imperfect in terms of interpreting a person’s educational potential. But the reason why Allie’s video seeps with credibility is because she, as a well-off, Caucasian girl with good connections and a selfidentified victim of the system, is willing to speak out against its biases regardless of the fact that they’ve jumpstarted her secondary education chances. In light of the recession, which requires job creation and more workers to fill those jobs in order to stabilize, the reevaluation of standardized tests – and the companies that benefit from them – should be an issue of precedence.
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