The College Board does fairly well for a self-professed nonprofit organization. The company receives an application fee of $45 from the majority of the students in the country; that means some $85,000 a year from Gunn alone just for the SAT. But these are old facts, ones that Americans have already grudgingly accepted. Why the renewed interest now? Because apparently, the College Board is not yet satisfied. The College Board has recently released plans for a new test: the Readistep, a bite-sized, two-hour version of the SAT, complete with writing, reading comprehension and mathematics sections. But wait, that’s not all. The targets of this new test? Eighth graders.

According to College Board President Gaston Caperton, the test is a direct response to schools that requested a “tool that would help them determine before high school what measures should be taken to ensure that students are on the path to being college ready.” However, this argument would carry more weight if not for the existence of College Board’s PSAT and SAT tests, both of which cover the same three topics as those in the Readistep and serve the same overall purpose of ascertaining a student’s preparation for college. Nationally mandated tests already cover Readistep’s other purpose of informing teachers on the subjects in which their students require more instruction.

Clearly, the availability of other tests coupled with the lack of real demand for the exam raise questions about the College Board’s ulterior motives. At $10 a test, the cost of this “pre-pre-SAT” is not outrageous, but it is nevertheless a definite new stream of income for the company in a field that is becoming less and less popular amongst students and college admissions officers alike. Set against a backdrop of increasing public debate and decreasing university esteem, the College Board’s sudden introduction of the Readistep exam to middle school kids strikes the critic as a near-desperate attempt to gain footing in a gradually shrinking market.

More important than the College Board’s questionable motives, however, are the effects that the test will have on students. For eighth graders, Readistep treads a dangerous border between needless and downright detrimental. In today’s academic pressure cooker, a pre-college assessment test for middle schoolers will inevitably push the demand to achieve onto younger and younger students. An earlier standardized test would cause younger students to worry about college and prematurely sort these students into academic tiers. It is easy to see scores from the Readistep being used to separate students by projected ability, determining their admittance into high school honors courses. However, projected ability is a shaky subject on which to judge students; early sorting discourages late bloomers and limits students’ potentials. In the end, Readistep would ultimately distract middle schoolers from the very subject it seeks to assess: their studies.

It is time for us to step back and reevaluate what it means to obtain academic success, and to what lengths we are willing to go to achieve it. If nothing else, perhaps now, we might at least make a conscious decision to drop some of our demands, our measurements and our evaluations, and simply let our eighth graders be.