I am a simp for College Board. I have been taking College Board tests almost every month for the past two years, taking multiple Advanced Placement (AP) and SAT exams.

College Board has made over one billion USD in revenue per year for the past few years. And they call themselves a “non-profit organization”.

College Board is a scam.

This “non-profit” makes and administers the SAT and AP tests to high school students globally.
The SAT is a standardized test for colleges to use as a frame of reference. The APs are year-long programs that teach college-level materials, which are tested in May on the AP tests.

This corporation dominates the standardized test market. Many teens in international programs in Taiwan take APs and the SAT. The AP program and SAT are just ways for the College Board to fleece families of “gifted” students who think success means high scores and top tier university access.

Fortunately AP tests and the SAT don’t hold as much weight as they did pre-Covid. They are now mostly an optional part of your college application.

Because these tests are not as practically important as they once were, and because they are so scammy, students need to stop worrying so much about their AP and SAT test scores.

Why is College Board so successful?

In 1899 colleges needed a solution to the massive increase in applications and find a way to standardize their college application process, and the College Board saw this as an opportunity to create the SAT. College Board later created the Advanced Placement (AP) program and test.

Because colleges get so many applications each year, they look at these standardized tests to help determine which applicants they should accept. The College Board also partners with many of the elite institutions, like Ivy League schools, sharing application data and doing conferences and promotions together. When students see the College Board and Ivy League partnership, teens assume that they need to go through College Board programs to get into schools like the Ivies. Many college ranking sites, and College Board themselves, claim that there is a correlation between high scores on their tests and getting into top tier colleges in the U.S. – which is an accurate claim, but only because the College Board has worked so hard to force their programs onto high school students. Because high AP and SAT scores help with the college application process, students take more College Board tests, which equals more profit for College Board.

College Board ruins education

Of course students want to get into a good college. And they clearly see that getting good scores on the College Board tests can help them. So then they obsess over these scores, often to a point where the score is more important than the actual learning.

Students spend time memorizing SAT vocabulary instead of reading books that actually build their critical thinking skills. Students may not know how to use these words, but when they get a vocab question on the SAT they will know what bubble to fill in.

One major problem with AP courses is that they are supposed to be college-level, which means high school teachers need to be able to provide college-level instruction. However, high school teachers are not professors. It makes no sense to expect high school teachers to do a college professor’s job. That’s nothing against high school teachers. High school history is important. But if we want kids to learn college level history, why do they have to learn it before they even get to college?

Perhaps the biggest problem with College Board tests and programs is how skewed they are to socioeconomic privilege. When taking the APs and SATs, the best predictor for success is a student’s family income, not how smart they are. This defeats the purpose of a standardized test since the results are not based on merit but on a student’s access to resources like test prep classes, tutors, and better funded schools.

Finally, when preparing for the APs, kids tend to spend all their time cramming the week before the test, either alone or at intensive cram schools. Taiwanese teens are already drowning in an intense cramming culture where midterms, finals, and tests in general burn students out. International school students in Taiwan still have regular tests in their actual classes, but with the added burden of the APs and SATs, burnout is inevitable.

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AP and SAT scores can feel like an essential part of your career as a high school student, but it’s actually just College Board’s marketing strategy working on you. Stressed students and worried parents are the best recipe for College Board to make more money. College Board has so much power in the education industry. Do we really want such a large corporation to have so much control over our education?