The SAT: Is it all that matters?

Any high school junior or senior will tell you that, either currently or within the past year, the SAT (or ACT in some cases) has controlled his or her life. With college admissions getting more competitive every year, and grade inflation which makes a 4.0 look merely mediocre, students are under more and more pressure to perform on these standardized tests. Many take the tests over and over and over in order to "prove their talent." The Perfect Score provides a satire of sorts highlighting the ridiculous lengths students will go to in order to get the elusive 800. In this movie, these lengths include elaborately coordinated cheating, trespassing, computer hacking, etc. While this movie obviously primarily intends to entertain its presumable audience (young people), it actually provides substantial insight into the SAT-obsessed college admissions culture teens currently face. The characters are absolutely desperate to do well on a single test, which they are convinced will determine the rest of their lives. Is it good that society places such pressure on young people? Will there be long-term ramifications on this generation of young people from the amount of academic pressure they are under? No one can know for sure, but something about teens being driven to cheat as massively as they attempt to in this movie cannot be healthy.