Thoughts on Standardized Tests

I loathe the concept of standardized tests. I do see its benefit that it allows for easy comparison of standard academic abilities between the students for universities. However, I believe it plays a far crucial role than it needs to, since these test scores basically determine which university you will be attending.

Standardized tests do not successfully reflect the student's full capacity. Just like the student mentioned in the article, some gifted students are not capable of performing well under pressure. This should not be the reason that a talented young individual be barred from further education. Just like the student in the article, I do not perform well academically under stressed situations. Things tend to escape from my brain, and I am not able to show my full skills to the colleges. For example, I have a 35 in the ACT Math section, one point below the perfect score. If this is not under testing conditions, I am confident that I will be able to get a perfect since then I will be relaxed and will not make stupid mistakes like I do on these standardized tests.

I also do not understand why these tests needs to be timed. I do see that if there is no time limit, then some students will sit there for hours and even days to finish their test. However, I believe that these time limits are unfair to students that are slow readers or others that take time to comprehend the material. Just because a student can solve a reading passage in 15 minutes compared to another students 20 minutes, does that mean that the faster student is academically superior to the slower student? I do not think so. There are multiple types of gifted students, and being a fast problem solver is just one of them. Being this gifted type of student should not be the sole reason that they get into their desired college and the other types of gifted students not.

To summarize, I believe that standardized tests are not an accurate representation of the students academic abilities and that colleges should not use this as such an emphasizing factor. Instead, I believe colleges should focus more on daily grades, which really shows the brightness of the student.