I am More Than a Score

I am currently spilling all my anxiety and stress on this keyboard/blogpost because it’s the most hated week for people in High School… finals week.

This is the moment in which I ask myself, “do I really want to go to college?” and then while fighting to understand trigonometry and Pythagorean theorem, I convince myself that this is just prep work to be successful in life and I’m just being dramatic. Then again, some other things go through my mind, like “Why do colleges only care about my GPA, SAT, or anything that comes in the shape of a score?” It’s infuriating to think that all the good qualities that we all have can go unnoticed because our grades are not at the top of the class. What ever happened to leadership attributes that aren’t shown in the classroom because we’re graded on the information that we memorize for a test and forget the next day. This isn’t what being a good candidate should be about. It should be about the people we are in and out of school.

Photo: Courtesy of Lola Montilla

School is just a place where we go to acquire knowledge and later use it in the real world as individuals. I often find myself thinking what life would be like if we learned things that we truly love, and things that will help us in the future. Citizenship and leadership do not come from a Pre-Calculus class or an AP course. We should be taught in the form that suits us the best, and sometimes sitting still in a classroom lecture is not the best way.

Classifying our knowledge skills by advanced learning and learning disabilities is also a way to NOT do it. School has turned into a monarchy of sorts and instead of uniting us, it separates us even more. Teen years are judgmental years as you have seen in my other blog posts and the last thing we need is another category to be divided in.  “Female, white, visual learner, kinesthetic learner, AP student, feminist, free spirited, controversial.” You see? We’re already disconnected a great deal and these do not define who we really are.

Colleges need to step up their game. When it comes to defining you for your grades, they’re the experts. When are we going to be asked how we feed our soul in our spare time, how we react to social situations, and what are biggest accomplishment has been? These things make us the people we are today, but are they taken into consideration? My proposal to every college stands. Ask us who we are, not what our ranking or GPA says we are. I’ve had the privilege of meeting friends who are nowhere near becoming valedictorians but are amazing individuals and the first to come to one’s aid in the time of need.  Classmates who are not in the SGA but outside the classroom are natural born leaders.

We are individuals, not a number to be ranked against 50 others. We’re learners of different kinds and members of our community in different ways. Ask us what we bring to the table, and what makes us unique. We are WHOLE individuals that can’t be made to fit in a checkbox or a standardized PDF form. The sum of our qualities, strengths, and accomplishments, I am sure by far surpasses any SAT score.