I took the Scholastic Achievement Test for the first time in November 2008. The recession was fog settling over the country, the War on Terror raged on a continent away where it couldn’t hurt us, and Barack Obama had been elected president a few weeks before. I had my Lifesavers and my TI-83 calculator, my No. 2 pencils and my testing strategies—it’s better to skip than to guess blindly, style matters over content in the essay, et cetera. Style matters over content. My SAT prep tutor assured me it didn’t matter what I said on the essay portion as long as I didn’t use personal pronouns or passive voice, as long as my writing was perfect. So I made up a few facts and quotations—a statistic, I think—, then I finished with a big risk: I made up a quotation and claimed President-Elect Barack Obama had said it. The public loved him; unless a strict conservative or someone who knew everything he said by heart read my essay, I couldn’t fail, right? Right. I got a perfect twelve.
This solidified what I already knew, which is that the SAT, and the College Board in general, is a business with a system. It has tricks and strategies, and it manipulates. It would be very difficult to walk into a school on test day and ace the SAT without any prep in the system, much less the content. How well students perform on the SAT allegedly indicates how well she will do her first year of college, but there is a flaw in this as well, which I will explain later. Additionally, the SAT only measures analytical intelligence, instead of analytical, creative, and practical intelligences. Because of SAT’s hamartia, I call for the abolishment of its place in the college admissions process.
Due to my parents’ determination to see me succeed, I spe...
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...ce, which measures multiple intelligences and more accurately determines a student’s general intelligence (Sternberg, 2012).
Works Cited
Berliner, D. C. (2005, August 2). Our impoverished view of educational reform. Teachers College Record.
Gorski, P. C., Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap. Teachers College Press, New York, 2013.
(n.d.). In College Board. Retrieved June 9, 2014, from https://www.collegeboard.org/
SAT (2007). In Free Rice 2.0. Retrieved June 9, 2014, from http://freerice.com/#/sat/1521514
Sparkman, L. A., Maulding, W. S., & Roberts, J. G. (2012, September). “Non-cognitive predictors of student success in college”. College Student Journal, 46(3), 642-652. Retrieved from EBSCOHost (01463934).
Sternberg, R. (2012). College Admissions: Beyond Conventional Testing. Change, 44(5), 6-13.
Basic education is mandatory for all kids in the United States. There are laws with minimum and maximum age limits for required free education, but this does not make all education equal. The minimum age varies from four to five to begin kindergarten, while most students graduate high school by age of eighteen or nineteen. However, there are kids that begin their education much earlier. Bell Hooks’ “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, Jonathan Kozol’s “From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s “How I Discovered the Truth About Poverty” have a common topic, “poverty”. Moreover, each of these readings has a different perspective with a different agenda attached, but “poverty”
Tough explains their analysis and conclusions, by which he reiterates, “… high school grades reveal much more than mastery of content. They reveal qualities of motivation and perseverance - as well as the presence of good study habits and time management skills - that tell us a great deal about the chances that a student with complete a college program” (Tough 153). As apparent in the above text, non-cognitive abilities such as motivation and perseverance are key predictors to the completion of a college degree. In essence, the researchers suggest that the increase in college dropouts is associated with an absence of these character
Templeton, B. L. (2011). Understanding poverty in the classroom: Changing perceptions for student success. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Education.
... a tedious process, but the change can have immense, positive effects for the future college student. The ACT and SAT that supposedly measure a student's learning potential through multiple-choice questions should be replaced by a test of a student's desire to learn determined through the analysis of essays, recommendation letters, and school or community involvement. This change can result in a more academically motivated freshman class. Standardized testing in its current form does not accurately measure most students' learning potential. It does not allow for diversity and creates a huge hurdle for many potential academic achievers. An adjustment to a diverse, open testing format of the ACT or SAT and a stress on the student's other academic accomplishments can accurately measure the student's desire to learn, therefore measuring the student's learning potential.
Mr. Caperton who is the current president of the College Board who officiates the SAT states the SAT provides tools for college admissions to compare student (Caperton). The Ex-Governor of West Virginia also suggests that the test does not discriminate against minorities, he argues that colleges who make the SAT optional do it to enhance their status and not in the best interest of the students (Caperton). Alternative solutions exist. The test is going to have a major reform starting in 2016. Article from USA Today by Zoroya discusses the changes the test will have starting in the spring of 2016. According to the article by Zoroya officials from college board announced specific changes such as the test will become harder but questions will be more direct and practical, shortened duration of the test. The major change will be the change of high score from 2400 to 1600. I disagree with those who argue the SAT provides an equal playing field for all. There are studies that show the correlation between high SAT scores and high-income student. This date shows the inequality the SAT brings. Therefore all colleges should make the test as optional. I realize that the SAT gives students with bad grades the opportunity to attend good college with great SAT
"Former Bates College Dean of Admissions, William Hiss, said that intelligence is so complex, varied, and multifaceted that “no standardized testing system can be expected to capture it”(Westlund). Throughout the years standardized testing has changed its purpose and not for the better. In the late 1930s, the goal of taking standardized test was to award scholarships to "diamond in the rough" students (Westlund). Currently, the whole idea of taking the SAT or ACT is getting admitted into a college. Standardized test should not be a deciding factor of being admitted into a college.
The Southern Education Foundation Study contends poverty is the greatest barrier in obtaining an education (Strauss, 2013). Unfortunately, the education system is not as equal as we presume it to be, as there is a significant discrepancy in the education system between high-poverty schools versus privileged schools. Students in high-poverty schools face many more handicaps in acquiring an education. One such disadvantage is underqualified teachers (Carl, 2013). This means privileged schools are monopolizing all the highly qualified teachers, while high-poverty schools are stuck with inadequate, unmotivated teachers— making students’ success at such schools much more difficult. Additionally in these high-poverty schools, there is not much emphasis
...g of the struggle of poverty and subsequent educational barriers. Though extremely grateful for all of the privilege in my life, it was difficult to realize my fortune until working with the teens at RYP who often do not have two parents, have limited adult influences, and live below the poverty line, making education an afterthought. From the perspective of a tutor and mentor, the educational support that the teens require is unquestionable, just like the injustices they face daily. Through service, not only does one gain perspective into the needs of the local community, but also insight into systemic issues of racism, poverty, crime, education and more. By participating in service and trying to counteract the sources of need for others, one will undoubtedly change their perspective of the framework question, knowing that the very least one should help others.
Especially in regard to educating children in poverty so they will not fall behind. Helping adults to understand how to help these children is vitally important because those in poverty have different needs and require a different means of motivation, “if poor people were exactly the same cognitively, socially, emotionally, and behaviorally as those from the middle class, then the exact same teaching provided to both middle-class students and students from poverty would bring the exact same results (Jensen).”
Subotnik also argued that “an overall track record of semester grades gives a better indication of a student’s competence (Gilmore 394).” Even though it had already been proven that the SAT has asked certain questions that minority students have little chance of answering correctly, Subotnik had always attempted to “deflect the fact that the SAT has always been racially and culturally biased (Gilmore 396).” Building onto what Subotnik stated, Shaw also believed that “the socioeconomic status and ethnic background of a student does not interfere with their academic performance (Shaw 1).” In contrast, Professor Guinier believed that standardized testing was not a fair indicator of a student’s overall success in higher
...itives. Some may debate the fairness of the SAT while considering the test in regards to college-admission decisions. Colleges favor the SAT because it gives students of poor circumstances a fair chance of admission. The misconception that colleges admit students solely on their SAT scores skew some people into believe the SAT itself is unfair. However, this is not true.
The format of the questions in the SAT are not similar to what students are used to in school. The subjects being tested might be the same as the ones taught in schools but the problems are structured differently than the form students have experienced in high school classes. When asking a current senior in high school about the format of the SAT questions the response was, “each question on the test felt like a trick question. The questions were not straight forward and all the answers seemed to be good enough to be the right answer. All the knowledge I gained from high school felt useless to the puzzle in each question.” Over the years SAT has been more and more disconnected from the work of high schools. Students have to study for school and the SAT separately. The SAT as a whole is deeply flaw...
Determining college readiness is an essential part of determining who will qualify as a good candidate for admission into a college or university. The last thing that colleges want is for students to qualify for admission and drop out, this affects drop out rate and graduation rate. Robin Chait and Andrea Venezia (2009). to about 83 percent of high school graduates enroll in some form of postsecondary education, but only about 52 percent of students complete their degrees. Further, a very small proportion of students complete a degree in four years—“among students starting at ‘four-year’ institutions, only 34 percent finish a B.A. in four years, 64 percent within six years, and 69 percent within eight and a half years.”
Exit Exams are an unfair way of determining whether a student should or should not receive his or her diploma. Most students work very hard throughout high school to receive good grades. This should be enough to determine whether a student should pass high school. There are many intelligent students which do not have good test taking skills, exit exams keep many good students from graduating and teachers have to narrow their lesson plans for these types of exit exams. These are all good reasons why exit exams should not be required in graduating from high school.
More and more people are falling into insular poverty. Insular poverty is rapidly growing, in our nation, into a huge problem today. It’s affecting student’s education causing them to work so much harder than the average American. To get a higher education in a poverty stricken home is almost impossible. Research is showing that poverty negatively impacts students during their educational