Since COVID-19 struck the state of Georgia, it has been made very difficult for inhabitants to safely grocery shop, commute to work, or just run miscellaneous errands in public. Furthermore, it has been even harder for our state to mandate PPE to contain the diffusion of the coronavirus. However, one of the most notable setbacks by virtue of the pandemic is the devastating impact on our students. In numerous counties, Georgia's youth will not be able to sit in their classes and pursue their individual futures this Fall; Our next generation of doctors, nurses, lawyers, STEM workers, businesspeople, etc. have a seemingly harder job now.

In 2019, the Georgia Department of Education recorded that there are over half a million Georgia residents enrolled in public high school. For these students, counties like DeKalb and Clayton have given them the option of remote or face-to-face learning. More heavily populated counties like Fulton and Cobb have warranted full-time online learning for their scholars to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Many schools within reasonable distance of Fulton and Cobb county have also prohibited numbers of more than 20 people in one building at a time. No matter how these students are learning, their next milestone has become much more difficult: College applications. More specifically, standardized testing.

School closure poses a deeper problem when it comes to standardized testing, a key component to college admissions, and using schools as testing facilities. Since March of 2020, thousands of students have had their SAT and ACT tests canceled, meaning that they are missing the most fundamental portion of their college application. This might have been the first test for an underclassmen and their first look at what they need to work on for a future exam. For upperclassmen (the class of 2021 especially), this was their last chance at getting a score they worked so hard to receive and a score they wanted to submit to universities. More importantly, these tests were an opportunity for students to receive scholarships and grants like HOPE and the Zell Miller scholarship. These tokens are essential to middle to low income families who cannot necessarily afford to send their kids to college on their own. It has been months since any student has been able to safely take the SAT/ACT. Without word from the College Board or the ACT about at-home testing, there seems to be almost no window for students to take their test, get a satisfying score, or even win a scholarship before they apply for college. With early admissions just around the corner, no one can say with confidence that these learners will be able to take an SAT/ACT with caution before the admissions deadline.

Over a thousand schools nationwide, including all eight of the Ivy Leagues, have waived the SAT and ACT on their application out of concern for students who cannot carefully take a test before the admissions close. Although it is a luxury to apply to the Ivy schools without the burden of a mediocre score from your junior year, there are still parents and families who wouldn’t dare to let their children leave the state amidst the virus (needless to mention that out-of-state tuition for hundreds of these schools is ridiculously expensive). In my case, I come from a family of seven where out-of-state tuition is not financially seen as an option; The coronavirus has not made the idea of out-of-state schools any more appealing. Nevertheless, this is my point exactly: This is a problem that many high-achieving students in Georgia are facing. There becomes an issue when the most prestigious universities in the nation are seemingly more accessible than schools as such from your own state. It becomes a problem when middle and lower class families of high-achieving students have to financially struggle, maybe even with a scholarship, since their child didn’t have the chance to receive a score deemed acceptable by a good state school. Students from outside of Georgia in states like California, Florida, and New York (the most notable epicenters) who are applying to Georgia universities will also find themselves struggling during the application process since these states have far more cases and far less opportunities to squeeze in a standardized test. Thus, a call to action is needed to sanction all colleges under the University System of Georgia to an application where the SAT and ACT are optional. 

As I’ve said throughout, with no wiggle room to improve one’s test score before submission deadlines, it becomes almost a necessity for schools like the University of Georgia or the Georgia Institute of Technology to go test optional. Emory University, for example, has made strides to ensure that applicants are not required to submit SAT/ACT scores due to COVID-19, but Emory is nonetheless extremely competitive and this decision does not cater to a lot of our up-and-coming college applicants. For Georgia to be one of the most at-risk states for the pandemic, we should be following the footsteps of other endangered states such as California and New York that made efforts to go test optional at many universities. Only a handful of acclaimed Georgia colleges have waived standardized tests, but our youth deserves a chance at our more notable schools like previously mentioned UGA and Georgia Tech. We are your future healthcare workers, attorneys, accountants, engineers, construction workers, and more; We are worth more than questioning our safety over a test.

Madeline Jankowski

Roswell High School Senior