A sophomore is in their homeroom class, staring aimlessly at the clock as the second hand makes its way around. Tick-tock, tick-tock: he wonders why he’s wasting time there in the first place.

If these thoughts sound familiar to you, you probably just took the English 10 PARCC: America’s newest edition in a long line of wasted federal funds.

The PARCC is fundamentally flawed; a few tweaks would not be enough to fix it. If the PARCC were to be a success, it would need to be re-worked from the ground up.

Taking the test on a chromebook, for one, severely handicaps a student’s ability to take a test. One cannot write on the test, preventing them from crossing out answers or annotating readings. The students are not able to properly process their thoughts, and it can hurt their test scores resulting in unreliable data. While the chromebook itself has its benefits, such as making it easier to read written responses and saving paper, it will not be an effective system until it is easy for the students to use as well.

To make matters worse, the PARCC does not even count toward individual student’s achievement. A test that takes eight hours of your time in two days (even though the combination of the sessions is only about five hours long) is completely meaningless for students. Students have no reason to put in time or effort because colleges will not ask for their scores and it is not a requirement for graduation.  The county claims to use the test to evaluate its teachers and curriculum, but will they get an accurate representation if the students feel no need to put their best effort into tests?

Most important of all these sentiments, the test is a waste of time. The school allotted four hours to a test that took just under two hours to complete. This allowed students to walk to nearby shopping centers, eat a complete meal and come back before the school’s real lunch period even started.

As a student, I am certainly not complaining, but one would think that CHS administration would want to make more productive use of a school day.

It is evident that in the PARCC’s current state, it is not an effective test. It is a poorly administered waste of time. In order for the PARCC to be a success it needs to be completely reevaluated and reinvented.