Junior year of high school is one of the most anticipated years of a teenager’s life, as well as one of the most stressful. Most people obtain their driver’s license around this time, gaining a higher sense of independence, and also start to get serious about their future after high school. High school students in America who choose to go to college as their plan after high school are more than likely familiar with the SAT or ACT, standardized tests that determine how ready one is for college. This means the higher you score, the better chance you have of getting into a more prestigious college. As someone who had a nearly perfect high school transcript with college courses under my belt at the time, it shouldn’t have been a problem taking the SAT. However, I was nervous to take this exam, knowing that college admissions looking at my score add an extra level of pressure to my future.

Even though I excelled in my academics and was college-bound, taking the SAT was like a shot in the dark since I had really limited resources for SAT prep. This is actually a problem for many students in my hometown, Oakland, California. My residential high school, Fremont High, is a greatly underrepresented high school with a graduation rate of 57% and an average SAT score of 980. Due to the lack of funding and resources, this is the unfortunate result, penalizing students such as myself with high ambition. Students like me in a situation like this usually have to branch out and find external resources, but this requires money when schools should be responsible for preparing their college-bound students. This is where the SAT starts to look like college is only for students who come from a higher-income setting when comparing my residency school to a more upscale neighborhood. For example, California High School in San Ramon, California, offers multiple programs for SAT prep for free as well as hosting the SAT on their own campus. During my time in high school, anyone who signed up for the SAT had to take it in a center for students from all around the Bay Area.

Seeing how I was set up for failure with this exam, I decided to take multiple college courses concurrently to not only prove that I was prepared for college but also to prove that test scores shouldn’t define a person, knowing some are more disadvantaged than others. After anticipating taking the SAT with a lack of prep or any practice, I found out that the University of California and California State University (CSU) systems made SAT and ACT test scores optional. This made me continue to take college courses and make my transcript look much more appealing to colleges. After the college admission season, I was admitted to three CSU campuses and was also offered admission to UC Riverside and Merced through the UC’s ELC program, where they automatically accept students in the top 9% of their graduating class.

So far, getting into these universities was only the beginning of debunking the myth of the SAT reflecting my real potential. It wasn’t until I stepped foot on my school, San Francisco State University, where I truly got to see my potential in college. I ended my first semester as a Mechanical Engineering major with a 4.0 and have enough credits to qualify as a sophomore, which I believe shows that I didn’t need the SAT (or really any test) to limit what I can and can’t do.