Standardized Testing Sucks

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Since I am a junior, I, like most other people reading this blog, will have to take the SAT or the ACT. I personally took my SAT yesterday, and I thought that it went pretty well. Yay me! But that got me thinking, what enabled me to perform to a standard that I was happy with? By far it would be the time and money that I put into studying for the SAT. Studying for the SAT came with many costs including purchasing books with practice tests.

Inherently, there is nothing wrong with having to purchase textbooks to improve my SAT taking abilities. But what I think is wrong is that the SAT tests material that is not representative of what schools teach. Take for example the Writing section of the SAT, when was the last time in your English class that you studied just grammar rules? I can quite confidently say that never happened.

Then take the reading section, if I was to take an average high school in the United States, I can also quite confidently state the level of reading that is required to successfully complete this section of the test is well above what is taught in that average school. What this is really showing is that standardized testing, is inherently biased towards those who can afford to put in extra money to learn the things not taught at school, but expected of on standardized testing.

When a society is moving towards a system that is trying to create race equality, how does it make any sense that standardized testing should be part of that society?

Comments

  1. Elliot LiuDecember 8, 2019 at 12:41 PM

    I wholeheartedly agree with my post. I don't remember studying a single grammar rule in school until I went to Kabir's Prep last summer. The first time I took an SAT practice test, I scored a 1270. Now, my superscore is a 1500. Assuming Kabir's prep was about 1600 dollars (this is actually a bit low), my parents had to pay 14 cents for every additional point on the SAT. This points to the fact that the SAT is classist. In fact, SAT scores are more strongly correlated with income than race and IQ. No wonder colleges are starting to do holistic admissions.

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