With the Fall semester in full swing, almost every high school senior is thinking about one thing. College. Right now seniors in Lemont and across the country are all fretting over filling out applications and being accepted to their dream schools.

Every year in the fall months, seniors begin writing essays, filling out tedious applications, and searching for people who will write them a favorable recommendation letter, all in the hopes that in the late winter months they’ll receive a letter in the mail allowing them to attend a certain university.

This anticipation grows for these students before they even press the submit button on their applications, and for some students the pressure of managing their grades and waiting on a decision from the universities of their choosing becomes incredibly stressful.

“It’s nerve wracking to not know whether or not your first pick college accepts you or not,” said Michael McClafferty, a senior who has applied to Mizzou and Carthage.

Throughout high school from freshman year to senior year an incredible amount of pressure is put on today’s students to be active in sports and clubs, be admitted into academic societies such as National Honor Society, Mu Alpha Theta, or National English Honor Society. It doesn’t stop there as many kids are expected to also hold a job as well.

Students are expected to do all those things while also maintaining near perfect grades if not better. Lemont senior Dominik Jablonski said, “Students feel a lot of pressure to have a well-rounded application so they join a lot of extra-curriculars which can have a negative effect on grades.”

What makes it worse is that virtually every university requires students to submit either an ACT or SAT score that will also help determine whether or not they are admitted into a certain university.

The problem with that is that there can be very intelligent kids who don’t take tests well but are very good in class and vice versa.

Why should a good test taker who knows the information he’s been taught be judged on his ability to regurgitate information on a worksheet for homework? On the other hand why should a near perfect student in the classroom be judged by tests that don’t test knowledge rather test your ability to take said test.

Most ACT prep classes don’t teach much of any substance or knowledge based things they teach you how to take the test. They teach the loopholes and tricks of the ACT.

What’s worse is that if a student has a perfect 4.0 GPA and attains a perfect score on a standardized test they STILL might not be accepted into a higher level school like a Harvard or Yale.

According to a Business Insider report, Michael Wang is an Asian-American who achieved a perfect 36 on his ACT, a 4.67 weighted GPA, an SAT score in the 99th percentile, took 13 Advanced Placement classes, was second in his class, all while performing in national debates and math competitions and to top it all off he played the piano and sang in choir. The same choir that sang at president Obama’s 2008 inauguration ceremony.

But Wang was still denied admittance to Stanford and every Ivy League school other than Pennsylvania. As one can imagine, he was crushed. It begs the question what is good enough anymore? It seems like to be good enough you have to do the impossible.

That sets a precedent for students who are still only teenagers that they have to be more than perfect to be admitted into the top schools they’ve been dreaming about for who knows how long.

How can educators look at a student’s application and see zero flaws on it and still decide that they are not good enough? The goal of any university should be to educate the masses not the few.

Colleges should not do away with selectivity. That selectivity is important in that it prevents students from going to universities in which they wouldn’t be successful, however, shouldn’t a student who does everything right be given at least a shot at attending a top university?

Now obviously the students that finish with perfect academic metrics aren’t left out to dry and some college will certainly accept them. In fact sometimes being the biggest fish in a smaller pond is better than being a big fish with a lot of other big fish in a big pond.

It’s not terrible to go to a less-than-Ivy-League school and be the best student there in fact that may be better for a lot of elite students, but perfection should be awarded and if a student does everything in their power they should be able to choose whichever school they want to go to.

People will argue that eventually more and more students will be allowed to attend these schools and their won’t be enough space; They’re not wrong, however, if that begins to happen, schools can always raise their standards of perfection. If perfection becomes too easy to achieve then make it harder. This can only benefit society as it will create an even more competitive education system that will produce better and better students.

If those selective schools want more from the perfect students, they don’t admit they should create tests that are more challenging than the standardized tests that every student already takes and admit people based on the results of that test as well as other factors.

Now, people may think that increasing the difficulty of becoming a top student will only increase the stress placed on the students of a generation that has more constant pressure placed on them than any other previous generation. But isn’t that a good thing? More students will decide that the stress is not worth it and will choose to go to a school less prestigious than the Harvard and the Yale, thereby solving the problem of too many kids being able to attend top schools. Pressure makes diamonds and if the difficulty is increased only the truly great students will be able to achieve those standards and get into top schools.

If schools want the best students, then universities need to either accept as many perfect students as they can or change their definition of perfection.

From the moment a student walks into their first American classroom, they are told that hard work will be rewarded and nothing requires more hard work than achieving perfection. So now that perfect students are being rejected, it forces us to ask: When did being perfect lose it’s value?