News Staff Writer
A recent tweak in the sign up policy for Advanced Placement Testing could have students paying more money to take the same tests. In years past, several combinations of AP tests were covered by one fee; now, students will have to pay for each test separately.
In terms of the Comparative Government and Politics/United States Government and Politics and the Latin Literature/Latin: Virgil combinations, this seems to make sense: relatively few students take both courses in the packages.
However, Choate students taking the AP Microeconomics exam are very likely to also take its counterpart, AP Macroeconomics, as it is already a prerequisite for the course. The majority of Choate’s seventy students taking Microeconomics ended up taking the Macroeconomics exam as well.
The thirty Choate students taking Physics C: Mechanics this year are also more or less expected to take its counterpart, the AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism test.
This price hike is ridiculous. I wonder what goes through the minds of administrators at Educational Testing Services (ETS), the company owning College Board, which has the rights to the AP Tests.
The new policy completely takes advantage of students taking AP courses. Students will take the AP tests regardless of a higher price, just as students will always buy the expensive textbooks required for their courses. I find the change especially despicable considering the income of an average teenager. Do we really deserve to be punished for taking challenging courses and trying to get college credit?
Last year, ETS lengthened the SAT, making it “more comprehensive,” to dissuade certain colleges from dropping the standardized test requirement from their applications. So much for being non-profit.
