Informative Writing Prompt #2

Its every Junior's favorite time of year. Four mornings a year, our state has found it necessary for all students in the 11th grade to sit for three hours and show how stupid we really are.
Lets take a look at the PSSA*:

One notices, it appears to be designed so that a four year old could figure out what to do. Alas, this is not the case. Every year hundreds of tests are labeled "unscoreable" because someone missed important steps such as, "writing" or "turn the damn page". One plus of this page design was the handy, built-in, souvenir, shown in use on the left column of our site.




On a more pragmatic note, our research department decided to look into PSSA test scores of previous years. As a disclaimer, we here at the SPLOoGE in no way support racial stereotypes. We do however find it amusing when statistics seem to be playing to them. Scoring "Advanced" in Mathematics were: 28.1% of all students, 31.6% of white people, 8.8% of black people, and surprise of surprises, 52.4% of Asians. To an untrained eye, this data seems, well to be blunt, racist. One however must take into consideration several other factors. The African-American population of Pennsylvania is highly concentrated in urban areas. Many of these schools are underfunded and, in many cases, more concerned with school security than test scores. In case you don't attend our fine high school, you might not realize that we are in fact, and "inner-city" school. Although much is blown out of proportion by our local media, a large segment of our school population spends most of their school time, preoccupied by non-academic activities.

In an effort to combat this our school has instituted in the past year several new programs at our high school in an effort to, basically, teach these kids how to read and count. This in turn is spurred on by several new state and federal education programs requiring better results from our schools, threatening budget-cuts and government intervention. These changes, however, leaves those students who either, actually care about school, and work hard, or, are gifted with natural intelligence, and can drift by with minimal effort. Students such as these, particularly in the second category are forced to find other "activities" to preoccupy themselves. As a result new student publications (coughtheSPLOoGEcough) have been chartered, and as many people noticed Tuesday morning, several students with a more artistic bent created a stunning, 80 yard, "symbol" on our football field, carved into the snow**. Who knows what those crazy kids will do next.



*Pointless Stupid State Affliction
**SPLOoGE agents attempted to capture an image of this grand work, but were foiled by overcast skies.