Opinion by HannahTaylor

“I qualified for a full-ride scholarship to University of Nebraska-Omaha” — do you know how crazy that sounds? Utterly crazy. Me, a pretty average student and occasionally good test taker, getting to go to a school basically in my backyard for free? Sign me up!

That sentence had been my biggest triumph of senior year. That was until I studied the UNO website for the 50th time on their scholarship qualifications. Except, on this sunny day in September, the requirements had changed. To qualify, a student had to have a composite score of 32. Composite. Not superscore. Composite.

When someone takes the ACT, they are given back their scores from that specific test—those are their composite scores. Superscores, on the other hand, are the best scores from each individual subject put together, resulting in their superscore composite being the highest score they could possibly present.

In all honesty, I was angry, then I was sad and then I was convinced I would enter my villain arc and uproot the entire NU education system. But as I began to dig deeper into my college search, I realized that this was not the fault of a public college, but rather the fault of unstable federal funding for colleges and the decisions of admissions offices in response to said monetary issues.

At least 410 colleges take the ACT superscore. However, there are nearly 4,000 four-year colleges located in the U.S., so slim is an understatement for schools accepting superscores. Oftentimes there is no pattern to the method of how colleges decide whether to take superscore or composite.

Every school should take superscores because every score was achieved by me. Robbing a student of their best work is disheartening at least and criminal at worst. As the standards for college admission and especially scholarship application goes up, it’s more than reasonable that students should get a small boost to try and reach these comically high requirements.

Furthermore, each time I took the ACT, which was three painstaking times, the answers in those bubbles came from my own mind, preparation and sore wrist. Each time I took the test, I had to pay, sit in a clammy room for upwards of three hours and squeeze every drop of knowledge from my brain onto those test sheets.

It also feels unfair to only take one test score when each test is different. My first ACT had majority math questions that I had learned sophomore year, while my last had more letters than numbers. And, since each test is different, of course a different score will be the outcome as new types of questions are implemented (there was no way I was going to figure out how to solve for a math equation with an exclamation point in it).

The ACT is supposed to be a marker of intelligence–or just ability to work under pressure–of students equally, so how can it be accurate if each test is different? Furthermore, superscoring shows how well a student can score when given the ability to improve and acclimate to a certain structure, a more important skill than sheer intelligence in a learning setting.

Some schools claim that superscoring is inaccurate because it either maximizes your performance or doesn’t reflect your intelligence in a given day. However, I’d like to propose that if that is the excuse for not taking superscores, then what do you call transcripts? Or essays? Or extracurriculars? Or any other part of the college application process?

The majority of people have good and bad tests— yet we use transcripts as a whole because they cumulatively show if a student has consistently done well or improved. I know I’ve worked on my college essays and scholarship applications over a period of months writing and rewriting to give myself the best chance of being “the standout.” And trust me, no one comes out of the womb being a D1 soccer player or debate team president.

What I’m trying to get at is that no other aspect of education or even life is measured merely by one randomized test, so why should the path we are meant to pursue for the rest of our lives be determined by one?

Although I highly doubt anyone else but frustrated high schoolers will read this, I do want to propose superscores being more widely accepted. Not just for me, but for every other student who has and will start a college application and feel their heart sink as they read over the requirements for admission and see “composite test score.”

Because life is never just a single test score, it’s a superscore of your messy moments, failures and most importantly, your triumphs.