Journal #1

Today J.B. Pritzker announced that starting tomorrow, March 21 2020, we will be quarantined in our house, only allowed to leave if it is necessary. This is arguably the biggest announcement since he came out and said that schools would not be in attendance until at least April, entering a phase that many have never experienced before. This whole corona virus scare has brought a crazy reality that just doesn’t infact feel real. It has cancelled/postponed things that seem to be uncancellable such as sports seasons, music festivals, heck it is even messing with potential outcomes of political elections. Corona has essentially put the pause button on just about everything in life which is a insane power that just about anything does not possess. The quarantine away from society has also brought upon some good things like allowing me to spend more time with my family. With Water Polo, school clubs and school binding me into my schedule I find myself away from home from the hours of 6:20 am to roughly 9:00 PM. On top of that my parents are divorced so it makes the amount of time I can spend with them drastically smaller. I am also able to get more things done at home such as simple chores and create habits in my life that I could look to use in the future. Corona has been essentially a hard reset for me and although it leaves me in my house for probably a month of my life, there can be man positives drawn from in the matter of my life habits.

The Standards behind Standardized Testing

My paper is about standardized testing and the many flaws in which it makes itself a not so standardized test. I touch the subjects of how the SAT and the ACT are a large source of inequality, primarily through socioeconomic status, but also through one's race. I chose to write my paper on this subject due to how it relates to my life and many of those around me who are similar to me in age. I believed I delivered many points on the flaws and problems in such a powerful and influential industry, due to their power in deciding college admissions. 

My research brought lots of surprising findings through articles and interviews and truly allowed me to become aware of what I’m going through to get into college. The racial inequality aspect is what surprised me the most throughout my paper. I was caught off guard by the consistency in which the average score difference has maintained itself throughout the years. On top of that, my research brought to light the gradual increase in the importance of GPA in the admissions process versus standardized testing. Although standardized tests are still valued by universities, they are starting to realize that GPA is arguably the best indicator of a good student. This becomes a large factor in my life and many of my classmates and just about everyone else trying to get into college across the country. It is still a large part of getting into college, and is taken seriously by just about every teenager in the country. I was also able to learn lots of strategies that students may use in their efforts to score as highly as possible on the test as they can. There have been countless intriguing points brought on by the test, but those that have intrigued me the most was the overwhelming amount of inequality surrounding the test. Socioeconomic inequality was something that I knew was a factor in the test but I never knew how great that inequality was. Socioeconomic inequality took form in peoples neighborhoods, textbooks they could afford, and their ability to purchase tutoring or private classes. The socioeconomic factor into one's test score can attribute to each question you get right which is not depicted through the number the colleges see which was the most interesting part of the topic that I found in my research.