Driving to Ferguson Senior High that morning felt like I was driving to my imminent death. I’m sure my fellow classmates would agree as well. Waiting online to enter the building is a blend of emotions between nerves, exhaustion and stress. Then hearing the proctor say “go!” and it’s a race against the clock and your future!
Only one acronym has the ability to make any high school senior cringe: SAT. The exam will be the most nerve wracking four hours of your life. The silence of the room, the pronounced ticking of the clock, and going into a frenzy when the proctor says there’s five minutes left. This anxiety will consume you causing you to blank out if you don’t prepare properly. Believe it or not, the only thing worst then taking the SAT is waiting three weeks for the scores to be posted online. In the few seconds between clicking a button and the screen displaying your scores, you experience a gamut of emotions; from fearful, to nervous, to hopeful, and back to fearful. Students may argue that the purpose of this exam is to shatter your hopes and dreams, maybe even lower your self-esteem a few notches. However, according to the College Board website, the SAT serves as a method for universities and other institutions to measure your potential capabilities in college. To put it bluntly: your future is dependent on these scores.
The SAT is supposed to be based on scale that will allow every student to display their potential for success regardless of socioeconomic status. Many colleges use this to determine which students will receive financial aid, as well as qualifying for other opportunities such as honors programs. This explains why student might spend thousands of dollars on private tutors, test prep material and prepar...
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...ors all over the country, we’ll be setting our alarms for midnight in the hopes that when we see our scores we might be pleased with them and enjoy the blissful fact that we’ll never have to suffer from this nightmare again!
Works Cited
Chan, Amanda. "SAT is not a fair measure of skills." Penn Live. Advance Digital, 3 January 2012. Web. 14 Nov 2013. .
Rabinowitz, Nancy. "What Does the SAT Really Measure?" PBS. WGBH Education Foundation. Web. 14 Nov 2013. .
Strauss, Valerie. "The bottom line on SAT scores in one chart." The Washington Post. The Washington Post, 9 Oct 2013. Web. 14 Nov 2013. .
In the article, Gregory Mantsio reveals a chart based on the test results of 1,465,744 SAT takers in the year of 2006. The chart given, displays the amount of the family income and how it affects the scores of those who had taken the SAT. The facts given, indicates that the more money the family has, income that the family receives, the higher the scores are. For example, if you had a job or career that allowed you to be able to bring in more than $100,000, then your child is more likely to receive a median score of approximately 1,100. But the question is, how can this be so? One reason is quite simple: The children born into a higher class has much more access to educational resources, are exposed to vocabulary and spoken language in their early childhood, and experience less stress than those who are in a lower class. Which in the long run, gives the children in the higher class a better chance when it comes to succeeding in life. Compared to those in a lower class whose scores are below the approximated amount of 1,100 due to their family
A young girl is excited about graduating high school and attending her first year at college. She tries hard at school and receives above-average grades. She is an active student involved in student council, band, the drama team, and peer tutoring, but her ACT scores are extremely low, disqualifying her from many universities. The young girl represents many students who are not successful at taking standardized tests because they have not developed the advanced skills required to take a test like the ACT or SAT. An academically motivated and responsible student should not be prevented from attending college because a "standard" test is not his or her standard. The current methods of testing for the ACT or SAT should be abolished and replaced with modified and less "standard" questions to better measure a student's learning potential. In addition to different testing techniques, a student's learning potential should be a measure of a culmination of activities and methods; testing should be less important than other methods in determining a student's learning potential, if not the least important. Standardized testing must evolve to encompass a more diverse student population, and it should not be the primary factor in measuring learning potential.
Even with material being taught incessantly, standardized tests can not accurately measure a student’s ability. The tests are “single-target—meaning that every student, no matter what level of achievement or ability, course selection, or cu...
One of the main reasons that colleges have stopped looking at SAT scores is because there has recently been much speculation about the test being biased against certain groups, these groups being African Americans, Latinos, women, and those of a lower socioeconomic status. Also, some colleges are not placing an emphasis on the test anymore because the College Board has admitted that the SAT is designed so that only one half of those taking the test answer correctly. (Alfe, 2002)
Presumably, the most widely known of these measures has been the Scholastic Aptitude Test (now the SAT Reasoning Test, or SAT). Developed by the Educational Testing Service after World War II, the test in many ways was the big idea of James Bryant Conant. Adhering to democratic, classless society, Conant thought that such tests could identify the ability of individuals and ultimately help to equalize educational opportunities (Frontline, 1999). Unfortunately, many have argued that instead of fostering equality, the SATs have become an instrument to separate the social classes, and many in the testing movement were not as magnanimous as James Bryant Conant.
The SAT, which is a national standardized test, designed to test skills, accuracy and knowledge of students has always been surrounded by controversies. It was originally created to eliminate the difference between students from different social backgrounds and provide equal level field. The test was developed by a psychologist from Princeton named Dr Carl Brigham in 1926, who also had controversial views on race, that suggested Anglo-Saxons were more intelligent than Other Races. Later in which he publicly apologized for. The SAT was designed to have impact on everyone equally, but studies have suggested the opposite. Initially the test aimed to give students from small towns in the northeast of the
There are preparation classes to take that help students practice for the SAT and ACT but it cost over $200 per session. To some people it $200 may not seem like much, but to others, including myself is pricey. Just to register for the test costs around $50. Students can retake the test as many times as possible but, again, every registration cost money. It has been proven that students who have a higher economic status score higher on test because they are able to afford more expensive test preps and retake the test to score higher. (Westlund). "President Obama noted in January, 'Standardized tests are not standardized.'Using the example of his own two daughters who have been receiving advice on the SAT since 7th grade, the President recognized that the 'degree of advance preparation' that many kids get 'tilts the playing field'"(Westlund). President Obama said it himself, the more a parent pays the better the score. Not only are these tests costly but also don't represent a person's ability to succeed in college.
Evans, Donia. "The Case Against Standardized Tests." The Meridian Star. 24 Nov. 2013. The Meridian Star. 01 Dec. 2013 .
Thousands of students around the country and around the world will be preparing for the SAT and ACT tests while trying to maintain a high GPA. These tests will potentially have a significant impact on students' lives. Some will be taking these tests for the second or even third time to get that 1500 out of 1600 or that 33 out of 36, that they long desire. These flawed tests are not truly able to measure how well students will perform in college as they are supposedly used to predict. A single test that students have to wake up for at six, seven in the morning on a Saturday and travel to some random location to take a difficult test should not impact the student's chance of getting into college, let alone predict how well they will do in college.
Strauss, V. (2014, April 22). What does the SAT measure? Aptitude? Achievement? Anything?. Washington Post. Retrieved April 30, 2014, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/22/what-does-the-sat-measure-aptitude-achievement-anything/
Standardized testing scores proficiencies in most generally accepted curricular areas. The margin of error is too great to call this method effective. “High test scores are generally related to things other than the actual quality of education students are receiving” (Kohn 7). “Only recently have test scores been published in the news-paper and used as the primary criteria for judging children, teachers, and schools.”(2) Standardized testing is a great travesty imposed upon the American Public School system.
Standardized tests, such as the SAT and the SOL, have been implemented for many years now for individuals in grade school to take. The SOL’s, or Standards of Learning tests, are Virginia’s version of standardized tests that students are required to take in order to pass a class, evaluating their knowledge on a specific subject. SOL’s are mandatory for students to take as soon as they reach third grade. Additionally, the SAT is a test taken in the final years of high school that colleges look at when comparing students for post-secondary school. People concerned with student’s education can come to the common consensus that education is important and there should be some way to compare a student’s achievements to one another. However, the process
Sacks, Peter. "The Toll Standardized Tests Take." National Education Association. 2000. Web. 2 July 2015.
Based on the Programme for International Student Assessment’s 2012 results (PISA), the United States has ranked 30th in comparison to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) participating countries. The United States, a country that has once held the ideal for educational standards, has now ranked just slightly above other countries that are just being developed. By using high-stakes test statistics to drive America’s educational standards, classrooms are beginning to lose their meaning of helping students to learn and grow as individuals. Because of classrooms just teaching the test are beginning to lose the meaning of helping students to learn and grow as individuals, results of high stakes testing which can be affected by the minutest details, are not a reasonable way to judge overall student competency; a better alternative would be by performance based assessments. “Test developers are obliged to create a series of one-size-fits-all assessments. But, as most of us know from attempting to wear one-size-fits-all garments, sometimes one size really can’t fit all.” (Popham, James W.). High stakes tests are not a reasonable way to judge overall student competency because educators can not expect to have accurate and precise results in just one sitting for 12 years of learning. Although tests pose an important role in education, they should not be given such high stakes of determining if a student should be rejected from a college “based solely on the fact that their score wasn’t high enough” (Stake, Robert.).