Miami is truly a melting pot, so it may not come as a surprise that I was born in New York and moved to Miami with my family almost ten years ago. Moving from New York to Miami introduced my eight-year-old self to novel concepts like palm trees, two seasons (hurricane season and non-hurricane season), drivers who enjoy going 100 miles per hour on the I-95, and yes, the dreaded Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

While my friends up in New York were  enjoying snow days and hot chocolate, I had the pleasure of being taught how to best answer a question on the Reading section of the FCAT and how to do basic multiplication. I took the test in third grade and have taken my favorite test every year since then through eleventh grade.

Many seniors, such as myself, neglect to mention that one of the best aspects of being a senior is that, well, we don’t have to take the FCAT, which my peers cleverly call the Florida Child Abuse Test.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard the phrase “I’m so jealous” escape the mouths of underclassmen and my brothers upon hearing that I don’t have to take the FCAT this year.

The Florida Legislature recently decided to “modernize” the FCAT and institute changes that impacted the way the test is distributed. While the Reading test is still given in one day and took up about four hours of our regular school day, the Mathematics test will have covered over a span of two weeks and is to be administered on computers.

Hold up. Last time I checked, our school is struggling to find enough classrooms to meet the state mandate of 25 students per class, because Palmetto simply does not have the physical space to accommodate such a large population with such small classes. And now the Legislature wanted us to magically find a computer lab for thousands of students to take the Mathematics test, even though our school can barely afford paper.

Our miraculous solution to this vexing problem was to sort students alphabetically and have groups of students taking turns completing the Mathematics test in our one computer lab. By the time our school will finish administering the Mathematics test to all eligible students, it will have taken us two weeks to complete testing for the FCAT. During the two weeks of Mathematics testing, the rest of the school continued to run on a block schedule, which to me was actually quite nice rather than sitting in the gym or auditorium, wondering how many times I can possibly count the number of ceiling tiles in that room.

So why do these new changes matter to me? I’m a senior and I don’t have to take the test this year, and never will have to again, for that matter. I could just as well tell the school that it’s their problem from now on to deal with the bureaucratic mess of administering the FCAT in such an inefficient way. But as my English teacher said, it’s the principle that matters to me.

Florida schools start weeks earlier than other schools around the country to give teachers more time to teach to the test and help prepare students to bubble in A, B, C, D, or E come FCAT time. And when the time finally comes to take the test, we take up two valuable weeks of our school year to administer a test that can be given in two days. Well, that makes perfect sense. And who can forget that it’s just so much easier to do math on a computer than on paper?

Standardized testing has always been a controversial topic, but this year’s FCAT schedule and method of administration is completely inefficient and unnecessary. As much as it pains me to admit, the old way of administering the FCAT, while agonizing, made much more sense than this year’s schedule. Can’t we just go back to the old way of taking the test, or better yet, forget the test altogether? What ever happened to going to school to learn actual information and apply it to real-life situations rather than learn how to take a standardized test? I think the Florida Legislature needs to get its priorities straight.