2060 SATs. 28 ACTs. 3.8 GPA.
These are the numbers that defined me coming out of high school. And regardless of the value college admissions say they put on these numbers, they are what we were told would determine our college, our careers and our futures in high school.
To be frank, the SATs are worthless. They do not show colleges what you have learned in school, they are not a measure of your intelligence and they are not an indication of how well you will do in college.
The SATs are simply a number that shows how well you perform on standardized tests.
Throughout high school, everyone, from guidance counselors to English teachers, extolled the value of the SATs. I was taught test-taking strategies, like how to tell when to guess and when to skip questions. I even had to take an SAT preparation class, which was essentially basic math and English.
The PSSAs, and the less infamous but equally dreadful 4Sight Testing, were treating with casual disdain many students not only because they were ridiculous and time-consuming but also because the teachers preparing us treated them with equal disdain.
In every English class, I was taught how to write for the Pennsylvania’s standardized test, and then how to write a “real” essay. In my AP English classes, I was told, “This is how you write for the PSSAs, but this is how you write for the AP test and that’ll work on the SATs, but in college they’ll want you the write like this.”
That wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst part of schools putting so much time, effort and value on standardized testing is that it made me put time, effort and value on what turned out to be a meaningless number. I still am proud of that 2060, and for what? What does it even mean? I took a four-hour test twice and paid over $100 to get a score over 2000 for nothing.
A lot of colleges realized that the SATs are meaningless. Hundreds of schools in the U.S. no longer require standardized tests on the application, according to NPR. Hopefully, this trend will continue.
But for the moment, high schools still praise the value of the test, advertising it in their hallways, sending out reminders for sign ups and testing locations, even, in my case, requiring students to take classes on how to take the test.
This must stop. Last year, the PSATs became a meme, with many teens on social media sharing the ridiculousness of their experience and the material they were tested on.
Along with the stress of PSSAs, 4Sights, SATs and ACTs, many students opt into AP and IB testing to get college credit for college-level high school courses. The stress of the number of tests students take is a factor in testing reform as well.
A re-examination of the No Child Left Behind law may lead to fewer standardized tests. Standardized testing is a mess of educators, law-makers and businesspeople, so it’s likely that many more students will be subjected to the hours of preparing and testing when those for and against federally mandated testing butt heads.
The new and controversial common core will come with its own standardized testing, which will likely be farcical and useless as those tests they are replacing.
Ideally, the same reforms will ripple over to the non-federally mandated SATs and similar useless and expensive tests.
Standardized testing is a tradition in America that either needs to die or be completely reworked. I should not have spent hours and days and weeks learning how to take a test. I should not have learned a whole separate formula for writing that I only needed to use one day a year. I should not have been taught to care so much about a number.
It’s been two years since I’ve taken a standardized test, but I have younger siblings who are facing them now. My sister doesn’t even know if she wants to go to college, but she paid money to take a test. My brother is hoping to graduate before the Keystones, Pennsylvania’s new standardized test, are implemented because failing those means he can’t graduate.
I do well on standardized tests. I’m just good at taking them. That doesn’t make me a better scholarship candidate, it doesn’t make me a better student and it doesn’t make me any more likely to graduate then someone who gets stressed out and does poorly on the SATs.