When you’re in elementary school, you spend an entire week each year taking achievement tests that are required by your state. Once you get into junior high and high school, the fun continues. There’s the PSAT, SAT, and the ACT. Thankfully, you don’t regularly have standardized tests in college, unless your professor decides that one of your exams will be a nationally administered standardized test, like those from the American Chemical Society. You’re especially out of luck if you’re a science major, because not only do you get to take these kinds of exams, but you have to take a standardized test if you want to go any sort of graduate school.
Here’s the part where all of the non-science majors think that they can escape college without having to partake in this delightfully fun event. Unfortunately, the odds are not in your favor. Depending on your chosen career path, you may have to take the MCAT, the GRE, the LSAT, or some other test whose name is made up of three to four words in acronym form. If it seems like the list of tests never ends, then you’re correct.
There is a large amount of controversy surrounding the administration of such tests, and understandably so. By the time students graduate high school, they have taken an average of 112 standardized tests. Many teachers feel as though these tests are unfair and that they are hurting both the school systems as well as the students. I agree; I am not the world’s biggest fan of standardized testing. Then again, does anyone willingly sit in a room full of desks for hours on end to take a $100+ test that’s made up of hundreds of ridiculous questions?
My strong dislike of standardized testing has grown over the years, but it is fueled by the fact that the tests require you to know so many pieces of information that only a slim population of students actually knows. For instance, how many people know the meanings of the words harangue or abrogate? I had never even heard those words before studying vocab for the GRE, but now I can regurgitate their definitions, as well as those of 600 other words. That’s right, I said 600 words. I’ve spent the past month and a half memorizing definitions in order to obtain a decent score on the test, because whoever creates the test questions expects that we’re all geniuses who are familiar with the elegant and complex language.
In addition to the English section, there’s always a portion on mathematics. This part is almost always filled with algebra and word problems, the topics that are learned early in high school and forgotten shortly after. Most formulas and problem-solving methods aren’t useful in everyday life, so why are they included? Despite what the test professionals may think, I’m never going to need to calculate the amount of fencing it will take to surround my garden.
Standardized tests are costly in terms of money, time, and mental health. They don’t show a person’s true intelligence, and a score certainly doesn’t determine a person’s worth. Instead of being forced to answer questions that have no relevance to our recent education or future career, can’t we be tested on topics that we understand? Oh, and I would like my money back for all of the unnecessary tests I’ve wasted my life taking.
