On Saturday, January 31, hordes upon hordes of prospective seventh graders flooded into BSGE in order to take the admissions exam that could perhaps be the first step into their acceptance in the Baccalaureate School for Global Education. The test, which consisted of a verbal and a math section, received mixed reviews from the students who nervously took it.
The children taking the test came from a mixed background of public, private and parochial schools. The children felt that the different schools they came from put them at either an advantage or a disadvantage for the test. Some students, such as a 6th grader named Kevin, from a public school, said that “The majority of the test was taught in school.” This made the test easier for him, saying, “The test was fifty-fifty, meaning that… some of it was hard but some of it was not. The hardest parts were in the ELA when I had to answer questions about grammar and also I didn’t understand some of the math formulas.” Other children felt that the test was very difficult because the content was not taught in a private school. A student from a yeshiva said that, “For some of the questions, I did not know how to go about the questions as I didn’t learn them before and had to resort to process of elimination and guessing.”
Interestingly enough, despite BSGE’s high standing on almost every high school ranking list, BSGE is not the first choice of many students. It has come to the point where students have been signing up for the exam and simply not actually coming on the day of the test. This happened on quite a few occasions and the reasoning behind the students’ “ditching” was that they would rather go to Hunter High School, a well regarded, well
The BACC Rag 