With a Chromebook balanced on her knees and three sheets of blank paper resting precariously on its keyboard, junior Han-Han Bui punches numbers into a calculator, brows furrowed. Around her are other students, some crouched on the carpeted floor, some using makeshift tables and desks carried in from nearby classrooms.
Bui’s situation mirrored the circumstances faced by 175 sophomores and juniors who, on Saturday, Oct. 14, took the College Board’s PSAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test in the stadium-style seats of the auditorium.
According to Guidance Department Chair Darby Neff-Verre, who helped organize the PSAT at the high school, testing in the auditorium stemmed from an unforeseen proctor shortage.
“We had more students registered to take the PSAT than we’ve had in many years,” Neff-Verre said. “For the PSAT in particular, [proctors] needed to be staff that worked with the Public Schools of Brookline. We sent out multiple pleas to staff across the district, but we just couldn’t get enough proctors.”
Neff-Verre said with the test’s new online format this year, the College Board broadened their criteria for rooms suitable for the PSAT’s administration: The test could now run as long as each student had a “seat with a back.” The auditorium—a last resort for organizers and a solution to the proctor shortage—fell into those criteria.
“Either we would’ve had to cancel 175 students’ tests, which would’ve caused an uproar, or we would have to find a very large space that had the right connectivity to Wi-Fi,” Neff-Verre said. “So, 175 students ended up having to test in the auditorium, which was not ideal.”
Of the “not ideal” circumstances faced by test-takers in the auditorium, many students complained primarily that the lack of a hard writing surface hindered their ability to write on the sheets of blank paper provided. Bui said she had to employ a variety of strategies to find an effective way to organize her work for the test’s math section.
“I wrote on my leg, I wrote on my laptop, I wrote on the back of a chair, I wrote on the armrest. I tried everything to find a flat surface to write on,” Bui said.
Junior Christina Dupre said she felt the difficulty of writing likely worsened her performance on the test.
“I was writing on the arm of my chair,” Dupre said. “I feel like I could’ve done a lot better in a normal classroom because a lot of my focus was on the seating arrangement and adjusting my paper, not on the test.”
In the auditorium’s open seating arrangement, some test-takers improvised to replicate a classroom setting. Junior Jack He, for instance, unfolded a plastic table that he had found in the corner of the auditorium. He also emphasized that the lack of a flat surface was unfair.
“It’s just not right not being able to access somewhere to write and not having a comfortable spot to sit in while testing for two to three hours,” He said. “[Being in the auditorium] was a disadvantage for everyone.”
In the wake of the PSAT’s revamped format, a shortage of proctors, an unprecedented influx of test registrations and a last-resort testing location, Neff-Verre wanted to make one message clear.
“I understand how [taking the test in the auditorium] was frustrating, but it was the best we could do in the situation,” Neff-Verre said. “It will not be happening again.”
