The College Board Is a Money Grabber

If you want to get into a good college, apparently you need to cooperate with money-hungry sharks.

By money-hungry sharks, I mean the College Board. This year, the College Board has decided to push up AP test registration.

You have to register for AP tests by November 3, or you will be required to pay a $50 late fee. In previous years, registration has been at the end of April. The question you have to ask yourself is, why?

For a lot of people, it’s much more beneficial to register later. For example, if you are really struggling in an AP, you may decide to not take the test.

You have to decide if the test is worth it for you. So, pushing the test registration up makes no sense for students.

The College Board claims students who register in the fall are much more likely to get a score of three or better since students are more committed once they sign up.

While this is plausible, there may be another reason.

The College Board, despite the fact that it is an educational non-profit, does make a lot of money.

According to Financial Samurai, the college board’s monopoly of administering AP, ACT, and SAT exams allowed them to make 1.1 billion dollars in 2017. Along with this, they have a large profit margin, making nearly $150 to $160 million in profits during 2019.

Pushing up registration could generate even more revenue.

More people are likely to sign up at the beginning of the year than later, because at the end of the year, students have a more realistic idea of how they’d perform on the test.

In every AP class I have taken, there have been multiple students who have chosen not to take the AP test because of how they had done in the class.

This means even more revenue for the College Board since students all rush to sign up for a test that they may or may not want to take by the time May rolls around.

College Board released a video saying that students will be more committed to the course if they sign up for classes sooner. Despite this image that the College Board truly has students’ best interests at heart, I don’t think they care that much about us, but more about their profits.

This is just another ploy to squeeze as much money as they can out of students through their monopoly of the field. The College Board is a money-hungry capitalistic company that it pretends not to be. The College Board needs limitations and we all need to look at what they really are.