By Adam Enomoto
Staff Writer
The Saturday PSAT testing date is inferior to the Wednesday testing date because it conflicts with team activities such as Model U.N. Students should schedule, the PSAT during the week since there is more flexibility to adjust the school curriculum.
The PSAT this year is offered Wednesday, October 16 and Saturday October 19 of October. Every time the PSAT is administered, it is a different. Therefore there is no chance of knowing ahead of time which test a student would do better on.
Students should be able to attend their afternoon classes if they decided to take the PSAT on Wednesday, but they may be so mentally drained that they won’t go back to school. When a student does not attend school, the school loses out on funding allocated for each student per day. According to Dr. Ben Dale, when students attend their classes the school receives money from the government. If half the juniors and sophomores missed an entire day of school to take the PSAT Wednesday, the total money lost would be a significant amount. This could be avoided by having school-sanctioned PSAT testing on Wednesday.
Since the PSAT is the same day as the Edison advanced conference this year, it complicates matters by forcing Model U.N. sophomores and juniors to decide whether they want to go to the conference or the PSAT. According to sophomore Olivia Everhard, choosing to go to the Model U.N. conference is essential because students who don’t go miss out on the necessary extra practice for upcoming travel debates. This extra practice is crucial for students who would like to be prepared.
Going to this Model U.N. conference is an important stepping-stone for many students in order to be prepared for later travel conferences. The issue is that there are not very many local conferences, from which students gain practice. Therefore, many Model U.N. students want to go to the Edison conference because it’s one of the few ways to get practice outside of class. Missing this local conference in order to take the PSAT would leave students in an untenable situation of not getting invited to a travel conference without any prior experience.
Taking the test during the week would also be better for students because there’s more leeway for teachers to schedule around many people missing school. Students could plan in advance by informing their teachers ahead of time and getting the schoolwork early. Therefore missing school would be much less impactful than missing a Model U.N. conference that can’t be rescheduled.
Many times these activities are impactful, so that missing one is very detrimental. It is also a negative experience when there are teammates involved because taking the PSAT forces students to let their teammates down. If it was a school-sanctioned day it would be part of a regular curriculum and the school wouldn’t lose money due to absenteeism. Also the students wouldn’t have to sacrifice their extra curricular activities.
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