For real, though. Not sure why we haven't figured this out yet. Standardized testing does not, and should not, measure or be used as a form of measurement of intelligence. Plain and simple.
In this day and age, the concept of higher education is an absolute must for those who plan on being successful in life. And when I say higher education, I mean everything beyond the high school level. Quite frankly, college is not for everyone. And don't even get me started on graduate school. Even if you do have a college degree from a commendable university, you still need a degree from a graduate school, or a law school, or a medical school or from a different commendable university in order to get a "good" job. So here we all are, eight years later and $100,000 in debt, trying to find a "good" job in order to dig ourselves out of this hole. But how did we get ourselves here? With the SATs, the ACTs, the LSATs, the GREs, and the MCATs. And that is all based on the assumption that we received good scores on those tests. And the fact of the matter is, some of us don't perform well. But doesn't our performance on these tests determine where we will be eight years from then, $100,00 in debt later? Are you catching on yet?
Futures depend on standardized tests administered to the stressed out students of this world. And I say stressed out because these tests are exactly that: stressful. There is such a thing as a "bad test taker," someone who can be the most intelligent and gifted student, learner, teacher, etc., but simply cannot perform well when tested in a pressurized environment. If colleges accept students on the basis of their SAT scores, what happens to that brilliant student that was nervous on the morning of her SAT and totally bombed it? What happens to that outside-of-the-box thinker that couldn't wrap his brain around the standardized nature of this test? Ultimately, neither of these students would be accepted into a college of their caliber or potential, and therefore wouldn't receive a degree that they deserve, and eventually wouldn't test well again on the MCAT in the future, and then... well, the rest is history. Long story short, the future of our country and of this world will be left with one less brilliant doctor or one less magnificent lawyer because they had a bad case of test anxiety back in the eleventh grade. Sounds fair.... right?
Wrong. As of late, due to the continued and increasing emphasis riding on the results of standardized testing, elementary school teachers have begun to teach specifically to improve scores on these tests, rather than teaching what normal elementary school students should be learning. Why is this? Because the title of a "good teacher" is determined by how well his or her students perform on these tests. So now our education system is placing unnecessary stress on students at a young age and on their educators, taking away from the true education that they would be receiving and administering were it not for these tests and the importance that they now have.
Things need to change around here because emphasis and value are being placed on an unreasonable and unfair aspect of our modern lives. Standardized testing is not an accurate assessment of knowledge, agency or capability in the real world and should not be used as such. It is changing the way in which children are educated and it is changing the way in which our adults are judged. Rather than measuring integrity, personality, and qualification in a certain field, employers and universities measure a number, a single score that seemingly condenses all of these qualities into one compact figure. Little do these people know that this obsession with testing is ruining our societies and doing much more harm than good.
