Do you ever realize how much of your life is controlled by someone else? Take your education— from your daily AP classes to your SATs, these major aspects of your learning are controlled by one corporation— CollegeBoard. So why aren’t we questioning the monopoly CollegeBoard has over our education?
We take the APs and the SAT to prove our knowledge and work ethic to universities, but it’s strange—why do a single corporation’s standards prove our credibility? Sure, you could take an alternative test like the ACT, but it’s a hassle; for an April/May test, the ACT has six locations versus the SAT’s thirty. CollegeBoard’s monopoly on credibility, if not inherently wrong, is dubious at best.
It’s a problem for a curriculum to be constructed by a singular corporation. After all, why does one company control what thousands of students learn every day? As our information systems grow increasingly divided, it is irresponsible for us to be following a curriculum constructed by one entity, no matter how exacting their neutrality standards may be; at the end of the day, people within this corporation are still fallible. Although extreme, a worst-case scenario of receiving all your information from one source (especially concerning history) is Prager U— see the issue now?
To be fair, CollegeBoard tries its best; the company hires committees of experts from various colleges and high schools to construct the curriculum for every AP course, a process that lasts two to six years. They even go so far as to list the institutions of the experts that contribute to each course, though the contributors themselves remain anonymous. For example, the APUSH committee consisted of experts from BYU to the University of Chicago. Even assuming these experts are credible, it is always possible that the political leanings of these individuals leaked into the course’s construction. We can speculate on the stances of the APUSH contributors from the institutions they serve, but we will never know for certain. I find the anonymity CollegeBoard provides these experts a violation of transparency; although I understand releasing names could lead to political pressure, the contributors to history textbooks are listed, aren’t they?
In addition, it remains questionable whether a private corporation should be so heavily involved in public education. When telling Chinese relatives about the SAT, they assumed that, since this test weighed so heavily on a student’s college career, it was administered by the government. When I told them the test was administered by a corporation for a fee, they were shocked.
Perhaps China, a country known for brainwashing its students with state-approved curriculum, was a poor example. But my relatives do have a point. Exams like the SAT and APs, which are paid, are fundamentally out of place in an egalitarian public school system. In a system meant to be essentially free, having to pay for these exams, unless a fee waiver is available, to get a leg up in the college admissions cycle feels antithetical to the system’s values. Although having exams and class curricula curated by the government obviously comes with its own issues, it is still worth questioning whether a private corporation has a place in the system at all.
Overall, CollegeBoard raises larger questions about the education system as a whole; our textbooks, after all, are provided by private corporations. Where do these companies have a say in our education? Where does “ethical” end and begin? I can’t say I’m sure.