Is The SAT Relevant Anymore? Most high school students don’t begin to worry about the SAT until their junior year. Some prepare earlier by freshmen or sophomore year, or decide to take the similar counterpart: the ACT. In a high schooler’s first two years, students focus on raising their GPAs as much as possible to become more applicable to colleges. By junior year, they are often filled with stress with maintaining grades while studying for the SAT. Students view the SAT as the one test they can’t afford to fail. The SAT is the test that can make or break their future. Many believe the SAT measures their aptitude; a high score equals high success rate. This places much more pressure on juniors who want a high score to prove their future successes. However, the SAT doesn’t measure any of what student’s believe they do. The SAT is no longer able to measure success with simple mathematics and reading tests because the test doesn’t reflect a student’s …show more content…
Unfortunately, this hold no use in the world when the student attends college. The freshmen is not beginning their careers after high school while they begin their college life. Depending on what they are studying, academics are just as important in college as the real world. If the SAT would open up more about academics, it could predict much farther than the first year of college. The SAT should predict success throughout and after college, proving that they will be successful in their future careers and endeavors. Improving the SAT and ACT with better academic tests for a student’s academic skills is a must, but in that same scenario, it should predict and measure success better than transcripts and last until a few years after college graduation. By improving their tests in this way, the SAT would be much more useful and relevant to colleges by their graduates’ successes. It would make colleges analyze their applicants more thoroughly and be
A scholarly journal written by an anonymous author sheds light on the importance of standardized testing by showing its efficiency in higher level education. This article provides a solid counterargument for the use of standardized tests which is standardized tests being a good source of predicting grades throughout college as well as whether students will stay long enough to graduate. It is also able to establish that the SAT is effective in forecasting a grade-point average through the fourth year as well as predicting students study habits. The
... a tedious process, but the change can have immense, positive effects for the future college student. The ACT and SAT that supposedly measure a student's learning potential through multiple-choice questions should be replaced by a test of a student's desire to learn determined through the analysis of essays, recommendation letters, and school or community involvement. This change can result in a more academically motivated freshman class. Standardized testing in its current form does not accurately measure most students' learning potential. It does not allow for diversity and creates a huge hurdle for many potential academic achievers. An adjustment to a diverse, open testing format of the ACT or SAT and a stress on the student's other academic accomplishments can accurately measure the student's desire to learn, therefore measuring the student's learning potential.
The Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) may have its faults, but it is by far the most efficient option.
A study conducted by Charles Rooney a member of the National Center for Fair and Open testing states that, "[More than 275 colleges and universities across the United States, acting on the belief that "test scores do not equal merit," do not use the SAT or the ACT to make admissions decisions about some part or all of their freshmen.]"
Many students feel stressed out when having to take standardized testing. According to Kaplan, colleges are relying too much on the SAT and ACT. They are using a long test that becomes equally weighted to years of school. That seems to be a little lopsided. A student can do well through out all high school and then score badly on the SAT or ACT and ruin all of the hard work that the student put forward in order to acquire good grades. That can alter the students lives by making them have to...
According to Robert Jackson in . “Retooling education: Testing and the Liberal Arts” Colleges who changed their admission by making the SAT optional have directed their aims into a more high school grade based admission. This solution is the only true measurement we have at the moment and it is a better measurement than the SAT states Robert Jackson. The writer also goes on to say scholastic aptitude should be abolished, as it has no true value or indicator of student’s ability. A more precise measurement based on four years of schoolwork is a pretty good indicator of student’s ability. It gives equal playing field for all students from their freshmen year in high school until their senior year in high school. Students have equal opportunities to perform giving them four years to accomplish good grades for college admissions. this method gives unprivileged students the opportunity to go to college who previously could not attend college because of SAT Prep cost. Also this method benefits college admissions by providing an indicator on how students will perform in college classes making it easy to admit or deny
Thousands of students around the country and around the world will be preparing for the SAT and ACT tests while trying to maintain a high GPA. These tests will potentially have a significant impact on students' lives. Some will be taking these tests for the second or even third time to get that 1500 out of 1600 or that 33 out of 36, that they long desire. These flawed tests are not truly able to measure how well students will perform in college as they are supposedly used to predict. A single test that students have to wake up for at six, seven in the morning on a Saturday and travel to some random location to take a difficult test should not impact the student's chance of getting into college, let alone predict how well they will do in college.
So, using these long multiple choice exams are what college’s consider to be a reflection of a student’s grades during their first year at college. The test maker itself explains that grade point averages during high school paint a better picture than their tests ("The ACT: Biased, Inaccurate, and Misused" 1). College’s use these standardized tests as a quick measure of ability. However, a test cannot explo...
“Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature”. From the beginning of time man and nature has been in conflict with one another because, as a whole, there is no cooperating. Each one tirelessly wants its way. The Man is fighting for dominance and nature w never yielding its authority. In American Literature, many authors illustrate this theme in their writing. Specifically the writers Jack London in The Law Of Life, Stephen Crane The Open Boat and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Fin. Each explores the relationship between humans and nature but with slightly different methods. Mark Twain uses nature in a realistic way, Jack London in a naturalistic way and Stephen Crane constitutes a combination of both.
At the University of California-Berkeley (Cal State), the minimum SAT score requirements for student-athletes were vastly below the average of regular incoming freshman. It is clear that in all three SAT categories, the scores were a 200 points below the incoming freshman class. Colleges in the United States are not focu...
Today, in the United States, standardized tests are administered every year by states to their Kindergarten-12th grade public school students. Different states place different weight on their standardized testing results where some states differ their funding based on results and annual improvement, whereas other states allow schools to simply gauge where their students are scoring relative to other schools in the state. These tests, however, are only standardized within one state. One of the few tests standardized throughout the entire country is the SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, administered by College Board and required by, “More than 800 of the nation’s colleges and universities,” (Comras, 1984). This test will be the standardized test focused on in this paper. While standardized testing is that, standardized, and enables the comparison of one student to another, the meaning of the score does not equate to a test of intelligence. Therefore, while standardized testing should be applied in the education system, it needs to be more indicative of the material learned in school and should hold less weight than it currently does in the college admissions process.
Although the SAT seems like a good measure and is used by many colleges and universities, it is not a good way to measure a student's ability and should be abolished because it has some problems. The ideas that show the problems are the not-balance fact between black students and white students that have taken the SAT, the fact that shows that a student's parent's income affects a student's SAT score, the fact about the incorrectness of the SAT scores that some students took in October 2005, and about the score which does not measure someone's ability or future.
Creative, analytical, and practical skills are the kinds of that should be used to decide whether or not applicants should be admitted to college, not if they are “book smart” and can memorize the book inside out then ace the test. Until the schools these days realize that these SAT scores will mean nothing in a few years’ time, then they would continue to reject people that could go very far with their skills. Never forget, “great schools don’t always produce great people.” (Sternberg,
does not truly depict the potential that a student has to succeed. On one hand, a student could have a 4.0 GPA, but score poorly on the SAT, and be denied a chance...
What makes a good person good? According to WikiHow, "We should learn to define our own morals ourselves. One of the simplest ways to do so is to love others, and treat them as you would like to be treated. Try to think of others before yourself. Even doing small things daily will greatly enrich and improve your life, and the lives of others around you." This quote shows us what we need to do in order to be what society thinks as, “good". In order to be a good person, you have to do good and moral things in your society consistently. However people might think that by doing one good thing once in a while will automatically make you a “good person”, but in reality it doesn’t.