The disappearance of a childhood in favor of private tutors, coaches, and other résumé-building activities has become the reality to a many of today’s youth.

Our ongoing belief in the quantity-driven model of education and obsession with achievement gauged by numbers has kept us from our original goal—which was to enrich and educate our future generation. Instead, we have produced sleep-deprived kids struggling to become number one in the race to nowhere.

It is easy to get caught up in the race to succeed when it seems like everyone else is a 4.0 student body president and team captain of the football team who recently started a non-profit organization in their free time. However we must take a step back and analyze our original motives for striving for those flawless SAT scores and piling up on APs. Was it to enrich our understanding of a topic that we were passionate about or was it so that we could check an extra box on our college applications?

However the first fault that exists in our current education system can be found directly in the APs. The typical AP Biology class is taught with a 56-chapter text book containing roughly 1400 pages of microscopic facts and tongue twisting terms all of which is considered fair game for the end-of-year exam. And so teachers start teaching to the test.

Thus a course that was originally designed to further engage and challenge students to think at a deeper level becomes a marathon of facts to memorize. Furthermore in a survey conducted last year of 1800 college students enrolled in introductory biology, chemistry, and physics courses found little evidence that high school Advanced Placement courses significantly boost college performance in the sciences.

Likewise, a survey of 8,594 college students taking introductory science courses found that students who took and passed an AP science exam did only about one-third of a letter grade better than their classmates with similar backgrounds who did not take an AP course.

Yes, memorizing 60 million facts does successfully classify the course as challenging, but to what extent are these AP classes benefiting students in the long run if there is little evidence of future success due to enrollment in such courses?

AP exams prove to be no different from college entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT, in which students drill through hours of practice test in attempts to raise their score.

We must ask ourselves in what ways do these tests directly measure intelligence? What’s the predictive validity of a four-hour long multiple choice test that has no limits as to how many times a student can take it?

Instead of wasting our time trying to game these entrance exams, it would be much wiser to focus on high school courses that, based on evidence, will prepare us for college and our future goals.

There must be a shift in our perspective of quality education. Maybe it’s time to start believing less is more. The increased number of AP courses taken or the increased point average on the SAT doesn’t correlate to an increase in intelligence or long term learning.

We must redefine our idea of quality education in order to highlight the intents of focusing on bigger concepts to stimulate more analytic thinking—focusing on what we will be able to do with their knowledge and not just what score we can get.

Furthermore, we must stop giving numbers so much credit. Numbers don’t reflect a student’s sense of purpose. They don’t measure creativity or wit and they certainly can’t predict the future.

Let us take a step toward creating a culture where we make choices solely on passion and not the desire to increase a number on a scale.