Staff urges students to appreciate themselves beyond a test score.
Welcome to Upper Arlington High School.1,815 Students large. An average ACT of 27. An average SAT of 1320. And an average GPA of 3.32-3.67.
It is so easy in a competitive environment such as UAHS to feel like a walking number where every test we take, the speech we give an essay we write adds or subtracts points from our number. Though we may not have class ranks, we still use these figures to show how much we’re worth compared to everyone else. We live expecting a perfect score and being crushed by every point off.
College can sometimes be built up to represent the rest of our lives. The amount of times you will hear “I’m never getting into college” is astounding when in reality, everyone knows there are colleges out there for all of us and other options besides a traditional university. But everyone also knows that to be recognized in UA, you have to be going to a top college, not just a college.
It’s very easy to forget that future education is just a small window into the large and exciting future we’re going to have. This constant attention high schoolers have to the college application process makes near impossible to enjoy sour last few moments of childhood. This is made even worse when we choose to compare the weight of one person’s application to another.
It’s very easy to forget that future education is just a small step into the large and exciting future we’re going to have. This constant attention that high school kids have to the college application process makes near impossible to enjoy our last few moments of childhood. This is made even worse when we choose to compare the weight of one person’s application to another.
As Theodore Roosevelt once said “Comparison is the thief of joy”. This rings true in the world of Upper Arlington High School. When you spend four years comparing all of your numbers to the numbers of people you have known since kindergarten, it can be very draining and feel like you’ve lost a bit of yourself along the way.
These numbers that we are so worried about boosting only show a small bit of a person. They don’t show a student’s creativity. They don’t show a student’s personality. They don’t show a student’s athletic ability. They don’t show a student’s passions. They don’t show a student’s character.
It is so important to find a way to separate your scores and the value you give yourself as a person. Every single student in this school is going to have numerous strengths and weaknesses outside of school and in the long run they matter much more than grades.
When the numbers start getting you down, it’s important to remember that the college search is about finding the right school for you. It’s not about turning yourself into the right student for the school.
Editor’s Note: On the print issue of the Arlingtonian in which this staff editorial appeared in print, we mistakenly said the average ACT score was a 29. It has been corrected to the correct number, which is a score of 27.