Students are unhappy with when SOL tests are occurring.
“I was shocked when I found out,” Addysin Martin, sophomore, said. “They’re making us take them [SOL tests] in April. They should be in May, because it’s the last month of school, and then we won’t have a whole bunch of time where we pretty much just have to sit there. With SOL tests being in April, we’re going to have a whole month of just nothing. What are we supposed to do? And we can’t just not go to school because then we’d be counted absent. It’s just frustrating.”
“They’re doing SOL tests way too early,” Chelsea Young, sophomore, said. “When we found out the dates last week, we hadn’t even finished covering all we need to learn. We still haven’t finished learning everything. So now we’re rushing through the rest of the topics, and a lot of people are probably not going to remember any of it, myself included. It just creates a stressful environment that’s not good for anyone’s well-being.”
“I’m honestly afraid I might fail this year,” Constance White, sophomore, said. “We’re currently in the middle of a topic, and I’m not sure we’re going to finish in time. I’m also pretty sure we have a whole topic after this one. I’m scared that there’s going to be questions in the SOL about things that I haven’t been taught. If there’s enough of them, it could cause me to fail. I don’t want to fail just because the school or whoever decides when SOL tests are couldn’t push the date back a bit more to at least early or mid-May.”
“I don’t even have an SOL this semester, and I think the date is too early,” Annabeth Shadrick, sophomore, said. “Most of the people in my classes are taking an SOL test, so when the day comes, over half of my class will be gone. It sounds nice in theory, but really it will just set our class behind, and I’ll have to sit bored out of my mind for an entire block. Sometimes my teachers have to leave as well to be proctors for the SOL tests. This also sets my classes behind, because it means that I have a substitute which usually causes the class to be rowdy. I just think it would be more beneficial for everyone if they had SOL tests after most classes have gone through all of their material.”
