Every senior high school student deals with the stress of getting into a college or a university. For example, an article called “The Absurdity of College Admissions” By Alia Wong says, “For all but a tiny handful of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who applied—pouring countless hours into agonizing over forms”(Wong Atlantic). Students are dealing with writing college essay with each college application that the student is applying for has a different topic. Every university wants to find the best student to fit in their institution. According to “Where College Admissions Went Wrong” by Alia Wong says, “The obsession with admitting well-rounded students has percolated throughout the higher-education landscape over the decades, making …show more content…
This is one the biggest stress level that a high school student will go through in their junior and senior year. While taking the test students know that if they do not get a certain score on the SAT or ACT, they would not get into college or university they want. Having that state mind is not healthy for young teenagers. According to Where College Admissions Went Wrong, “Students today still spend months and sometimes even years of grueling work to secure a spot, spending thousands on test prep” (Wong Atlantic). Having high school students to spend money for tutors to do better on the test is ridiculous because some student still would not do well. Also with low income students are not able require that type of help to may get a small amount of help. Universities are trying to downgrade their choices or limiting their choices by requiring high school students to get certain score. In today’s society, most of students are not getting accepted because they have high G.P.A but a low standardize test score. Students required both to be high because it is competitive and puts a lot a pressure to on them. For example, Where College Admissions Went Wrong stated, “The intense competition, it fuels undermines students’ well-being; pressures applicants to fine-tune their test-taking skills and inflate their resumes; and distorts the purpose of higher education” (Wong Atlantic). Standardize test give away the higher education to student and defeating the purpose that education is to gain knowledge, not for being a competitive sport. There are colleges and universities that do not have SAT and ACT as required for admission. For example, Minerva schools at KGI, a university that is a live online teaching, does not require SAT and ACT scores to gain entry. As Graeme Wood Said, “SATs are not considered”(Woods 514). These students are doing fine. They are able to do to get a higher
Frank Bruni’s article, “Today’s Exhausted Superkids”(2015), condemns the social standards of perfection inflicted on teenagers during their high school years. Bruni supports his claim by acknowledging the stress teenagers experience on a regular basis, providing evidence from books relating to the topic, and questioning the extent of how insane the desire for college has become. Bruni’s purpose is to help push people to redefine success in order to help the youth become less focused towards a societal goal of higher education that causes countless children to become insane due to constant panic to earn a spot in the Ivy Leagues. Due to the topic of the article it is mainly written to college admissions and adults in order to address
Applying to college in the United States of America can be a long process consisting of many requirements. College admission requirements have been changing for centuries “in order to ensure that the full range of talent that an institution is capable of developing is properly represented in the student body” according to Andrew Beale in his article “The Evolution of College Admission Requirements.” During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries admission was granted based on ones “ability to read and translate Latin and Greek.” By the time the 1950s surfaced, there was an increase in standardized exams which soon adopted environmental and nonintellectual factors by the 1960s, Beale writes. As we know, there should be a fair playing field
Many students feel stressed out when having to take standardized testing. According to Kaplan, colleges are relying too much on the SAT and ACT. They are using a long test that becomes equally weighted to years of school. That seems to be a little lopsided. A student can do well through out all high school and then score badly on the SAT or ACT and ruin all of the hard work that the student put forward in order to acquire good grades. That can alter the students lives by making them have to...
According to Robert Jackson in . “Retooling education: Testing and the Liberal Arts” Colleges who changed their admission by making the SAT optional have directed their aims into a more high school grade based admission. This solution is the only true measurement we have at the moment and it is a better measurement than the SAT states Robert Jackson. The writer also goes on to say scholastic aptitude should be abolished, as it has no true value or indicator of student’s ability. A more precise measurement based on four years of schoolwork is a pretty good indicator of student’s ability. It gives equal playing field for all students from their freshmen year in high school until their senior year in high school. Students have equal opportunities to perform giving them four years to accomplish good grades for college admissions. this method gives unprivileged students the opportunity to go to college who previously could not attend college because of SAT Prep cost. Also this method benefits college admissions by providing an indicator on how students will perform in college classes making it easy to admit or deny
Symonds, William C. “College Admissions: The Real Barrier Is Class.” Business Week 4 Apr, 2003: 66-67.
"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.
Standardized tests should not be used to measure student proficiency. These tests are becoming much more challenging and high stakes, resulting in a significant amount of stress and anxiety in students. Standardized testing has become a huge weight on students which is leading to test anxiety. Jasmine Evans writes in her article “Problems With Standardized Testing,” from Education.com about critics of the No Child Left Behind, an act passed in 2001 one under the administration of George W. Bush, who say that there is a lot of pressure on teachers, students, and parents, and school officials as a result of these tests. They say the pressure to...
Standardized tests cover certain material, which gives teachers something specific to teach. This is helpful, in that it allows teachers to know exactly what to teach. It also sets up a goal for the teachers, which is to get the students to pass. However, this process leaves something to be desired. Because the test is so important to the future of the students, teachers, and school, helping students to pass test becomes the most important part of their schooling. This restricts the educators from teaching students about things that are more important. College is usually next step for students after high school so it would seem logical that high school prepares them for college, but teachers are so busy preparing students for the test that they are not preparing them for the future. Consequently, students arrive at college ill-prepared, with shallow educations (Gitlin).
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.
Society puts too much pressure on high school students to attend a 4-year college right after graduation. Though this is an attainable goal for some, a great majority of students are not fully prepared for the demands of college. 4-year schools require an incredible amount of maturity and preparation, leaving very little room for mistakes. Schools often overlook this aspect because their main goal is to get as many students into 4-year college as possible. This is a great goal to have however they send students off to college who aren’t ready to be handle the difficult of their courses while being away from home. My senior year of high school, my family and I came to the conclusion that we were not going to be able to afford four-year college tuition. This upset me at first because I felt like all my hard work and good grades went to waste. I dreaded the thought of going to community college because my who...
The college application process is one of the hardest parts of a high school career.
Why is standardized testing part of the college admission process? Some of us might still remember taking the SAT or ACT when we were applying for college; however few of us question why we have to take such a test. Millions of dollars are spent on prep materials all so we can achieve a decent score and hope colleges will be impressed. The College Board claims a high SAT or ACT score correlates to college success which is defined as a good GPA throughout college. However if you stop and ask yourself what the SAT or ACT has to do with college success, most of us will arrive at the conclusion that these tests have almost have nothing to do with college success. Some of the questions are simply on these tests are simply ridiculous and will never
College life is a journey taken by many high school graduate in effort to explore a higher form of education, and most importantly build a new life outside the boundaries of their families to sustain a long path of toward successful career and to some, building a new family of their own. In the United State we are blessed with an education system that is never available worldwide. Laws are placed to allow every students regardless of ethnicity, gender or class a chance to pursue education in among the most prestigious universities in the world such as Ivy League school as well as many large public universities with many programs. This vast number of education institutions available of every type of students create this big diversity leading the U.S. to be the frontrunner of education in the world.
It seems as though the majority of college students these days aren’t looking to further their education because it’s what they really want, they do it to please their parents, to be accepted by society, or because there’s nothing else for them to do (Bird, 372). These expectations have led to students being unhappy and stressed, and have pushed them into a school or a job that they don’t particularly care for.
Are the new standards and expectations the world has for teenagers really creating monsters? The amount of stress that is put on students these days between trying to balance school, homework, extra curricular activities, social lives, sleep and a healthy lifestyle is being considered a health epidemic (Palmer, 2005). Students are obsessing over getting the grades that are expected of them to please those that push them, and in return, lose sleep and give up other aspects of their lives that are important to them, such as time with friends and family, as well as activities that they enjoy. The stress that they endure from the pressures of parents, teachers, colleges, and peers has many physical as well as mental effects on every student, some more harmful than others. The extreme pressure on students to get perfect grades so that they will be accepted into a college has diminished the concept of actually learning and has left the art of “financing the system” in order to succeed in its place (Palmer, 2005).