Gunn will be dedicating an entire school day on Wednesday to college admittance, testing and career exploration. Juniors, sophomores and freshmen will be taking the Preliminary SAT (PSAT), PLAN and EXPLORE respectively from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., while the seniors will attend Stanford Psychologist Fred Luskin’s stress reduction lecture.

The school decided to host the PSAT on Wednesday instead of Saturday, the usual day of the test. “We did not want to have students come to school on Saturday for the PSAT, so we decided to host it on Wednesday,” Principal Noreen Likins said. College Board administers the PSAT and only offers the test on a specific Wednesday and Saturday of the year.

The PSAT date this year will coincide with Homecoming week. “[The Student Executive Council (SEC)] knew in advance that the PSAT would be held during Homecoming week,” Special Events Commissioner junior Ting Ting Liu said. According to Liu, SEC could not change Homecoming week because it is usually set to coincide with the football schedule. However, the games and activities that the SEC planned for Homecoming week will still occur with the Jamba Chug taking place after school on Wednesday.

Freshmen and sophomores will take EXPLORE and PLAN respectively, which are two new standardized tests administered by American College Testing (ACT), on Wednesday. “PLAN and EXPLORE are just like the ACT and aim to give students information on their areas of strengths and weaknesses,” Assistant Principal of Guidance Kimberly Cowell said.

This year the school will pay for students to take PLAN and EXPLORE. “We had money left over from AB-1802, a bill that [the] state passed to give money to schools for personnel and materials, that would help prepare students to pass the High School Exit Exam,” Cowell said.

PLAN and EXPLORE test students in reading, English, math and science–the main subject criteria of high school curriculum. “The PSAT is based more on the eleventh grade curriculum whereas PLAN and EXPLORE are based on freshmen and sophomore curriculum respectively,” Cowell said.

PLAN and EXPLORE have an interest inventory that students are required to answer when they take the test. The interest inventory is a 72-item survey that helps students identify majors that match their interests. According to the ACT Web site, one of the hardest tasks facing adolescents and adults is choosing a career, so the interest inventory provides a range of choices students might be interested in.

The survey does not mention any occupational titles or job-specific duties. According to the ACT Web site, the survey uses very few gender-specific terms. Instead, the survey uses items that are familiar to people either by observation or participation (e.g. fixing a toy or conducting a meeting) in order to describe a career category. For example, instead of asking a student if they are interested in being a real estate agent, there will be choices such as business person or houses.

After taking the test, students will be mailed their score report, which includes their testing scores and survey results. The results from the interest inventory are explained to the student through a circular diagram called the World-of-Work Map.

“A lot of people are unsure of their future careers, so the test will open up different possibilities of future careers to students who do not know what they want to do in the future,” freshman Cassie Chen said. The goal of the survey is to show students their likes and dislikes and give them different career possibilities that are geared towards the students’ interests. As PLAN and EXPLORE are both offered freshmen and sophomore year, students will know what kind of classes they should choose when pursuing a career. “Most sophomores don’t know what they want in the future,” sophomore Kieran Gallagher said. “Having a survey of what career choices we want will help in choosing the electives for that career.”

PLAN and EXPLORE also illustrate students’ weaknesses for each section. “The tests are grade level explicit and the scores of the test are very specific in showing students’ strengths and areas of growth,” Cowell said. ACT shows the questions a student has answered correctly or incorrectly as well as a list that tells a student what to work on in order to improve their grade. “I think that having a score card that shows what you are being tested on, what you missed and what needs to be improved on is extremely helpful,” sophomore Brian Chang said. “For example, you could be good in grammar but not in vocabulary and good at trigonometry but not in geometry; having a score card would help dramatically.”

The senior assembly parallels the test sophomores and freshmen will be taking except that seniors will participate in discussions. After attending Luskin’s stress reduction lecture, seniors will be split into groups led by a student volunteer or ROCK mentor. Each student volunteer will lead the group in a discussion about Luskin’s stress reduction speech.

Afterwards, the seniors will be separated into two other groups that deal with college and career topics. “Students will pick two out of eight career sessions the week before, and they will be attending them after the student-led discussion,” Cowell said. Some sessions that seniors have signed up for will be essay writing tips and University of California/California State University application help. Along with college and career sessions, the administration has brought in 12 people whose careers are either in medicine, education, building, design and business.

“For education, we have an elementary school teacher, a high school teacher and then a professor coming to talk to the students,” Cowell said. The administration randomly surveyed seniors asking them what they would want to have if there was a assembly about college and career. “A great majority of students asked to have people from different professions come in and talk about their jobs,” Cowell said. “We wanted to bring in a community college official to come to talk to the students, but they had all been booked a year before.”

According to Cowell, Gunn will be having the same assembly for seniors next year if all goes well. The administration will enlarge the range of career categories for students by adding more career categories. “Instead of having just medical, building and design, business and education, we want to add more careers such as financial, but it all depends on what the seniors want,” Cowell said.