It’s that time of year again when upperclassmen get a bit anxious over the next five years of their lives. They ask themselves: “What Advanced Placement courses will look most impressive on my résumé?” “If I volunteer at a soup kitchen and feed dozens of homeless people, how many community service hours will I get?” “How many honor societies do I need to get into in order to make myself look like a good person?”

Unfortunately, these kids’ sense of morality, or lack thereof, isn’t the only thing they sacrifice at this point in their lives. Time and money usually follow at a pretty rapid pace. Princeton Review has graciously lowered their prices for test review from $3000 to the discount price of $1600. This small investment can lead up to two hundred more points on the average SAT score. Test Takers guarantees up to four hundred points for $2000 per semester, or about fifty hours. That’s two months of Saturdays that could be spent sleeping, exercising, seeing friends, or more importantly, studying. Is there anything as important to learn as standardized testing material? Students must also worry about the AP’s they take in order to be truly serious about their futures. After all, such advanced courses could possibly count as college credit in a few select universities.

Now, say a student has taken the SAT twice. That could require repeating a prep course, paying two testing fees, and doubling the amount of time spent studying. If my math serves correctly, that’s about four months of test prep and $4086 dollars spent. And God forbid one of these students takes more than one AP class, he or she would have to add ninety-one dollars per test. Five thousand dollars already and the kid’s not even in college, where spending ten grand a semester would be a godsend. In theory, today’s average teenager with minimal intelligence and breathtaking sleep deprivation would be worth, at minimum, forty grand.

The solution is simple. Those in their junior and senior years of high school should auction themselves off to pay for all of their educational expenses. Internal organs alone sell for twenty five thousand dollars on the black market. And really, how many of those other fingers are important on the hand you don’t write with?

As for the time issue, it is clear less rigid deadlines would make the problem even worse. Furthermore, students shouldn’t have any awareness of the hour at which they’re staying up until. Knowing it’s 3:00 AM on a Wednesday night will only make them more tired. Thus, watches and clocks should be either burnt or recycled into something useful, such as number two pencils or backpack zippers. That way, the children, or soon-to-be-maybe-independent adults, don’t have to stress over all the precious moments they spent inhaling books and not reading them. They can study in ignorant bliss, hours away from family and friend alike. Stress levels would surely deflate to panic attacks every other day, instead of every other minute. If the College Board won’t cut down on costs, lower the importance of standardized tests, gradually prepare students or guarantee financial security, then the choice is obvious. Students must sell themselves. If one’s money and time have already been ripped away, what else is left? How much is a person worth without them? According to the College Board, about forty grand.