This year, Neuqua stopped providing for the registration process and cost of the PSAT — the practice SAT — for juniors. This came with a number of other changes and a number of issues.

Juniors are no longer required to take the PSAT, and they’re no longer registered by the school for it. Instead, they must sign up themselves through an online server or their class house and must pay a $23 fee. The fee is waivable under certain financial conditions. However, the change was poorly advertised by the school.

Some students rushed to register just before the deadline. Some missed it entirely. That certainly doesn’t make it easy to figure out the fee waiver system, either. This poor advertising deprived some students of the chance to take the last practice before their actual SAT and the only test that could qualify them for the National Merit Scholarship Program.

There is something disquieting about asking students to pay for the change to get merit scholarships. It places the students who may need them most at a disadvantage.

The financial trouble the district is having is understandable. Illinois is struggling and bringing the public school system with it. District 204 is probably not the only school district to face difficulties paying for and administering the test. It’s not an easy bill to foot or an easy task to handle.

Perhaps the school genuinely has no choice but to require able juniors to pay for their test. Fine. But that does not excuse them from making the exam properly advertised and accessible, and it does not excuse them from providing the exam in a proper setting.

The system this year was more than flawed. The test was moved from the small quiet classrooms of 30 or so people to the auxillary and gymnastics gyms. The gyms are not a testing environment conducive to success. They are hot, crowded, and noisy. Every sound is amplified; even the lights buzz, creating an incessant layer of irritating white-noise.

The district’s given reason for the change is the desire to decrease student stress by decreasing standardized tests. Unfortunately, they miscalculated. Perhaps other grades were less stressed, but for testing juniors, the PSAT was no longer a half-day dedicated solely to the exam. They had to continue classes after the test and worry about making up five-six periods of the eight period day — both classwork and assignments. Some students skipped lunch to avoid missing that extra class.

Underclassmen will now be taking the PSAT in spring instead of fall, and though it’s impossible to predict exactly how it will go, if the school doesn’t work on improving this system, future generations will be stuck with a test that tests the ability to handle frustration and inconvenience more than it tests the ability to understand literature or calculate x.