<p>SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test, is three-hours of multiple-choice horror. It is almost every teenagers worst fear. Starting from the very beginning, children are taught what a test is and how to take it. However what we are not told is that we will be taking the same type of test throughout our lives. This is because we as human beings enjoy our lives to be structured and once we find something that works even minutely we continue using it for an eternity. The standardized test is used only by the United States as a way to create a uniformed test for colleges, to appropriately grade students who are applying to college. It is one of the hardest tests not only to take but also because of what it is testing.
The SAT is hard to take because it is divided into different parts that take a total of three hours and forty-five minutes to complete. It tests you on Math, English, and Writing, all in one sitting. The SAT is a test that is created to be fair for everyone however it has some major flaws in its claim of being fair. These reasons are that the test is demoralizing, the test is designed for a specific group of people, and the scores are not graded on an equal scale.
The SAT is a demoralizing test because of the influential power it has been given. Before when people applied to college they would apply to one or two schools because they knew that the schools they applied for would be the ones they would be getting in; however today students are applying to 10 or 12 schools in hopes that one of those schools will accept them. An article written by Allen Grove states that first time freshman applications should apply to multiple schools, I've seen recommendations ranging from 3 to 12. If you talk to guidance counselors, you'll hear stories of students applying to 20 or more schools. (Grove) This is because colleges have this test that they use to try and generalize everyones knowledge. And this makes it so that the lower score you get the worse you feel. Because even if you are a top notch student in school or the captain of the football team if you do not score well on a single test the life as a college student can easily become a dream. A friend of mine had this situation come up, in which she was a student with high grades in school but low SAT scores and she was unable to go to a college in another state. She was so disappointed in the system and herself that she actually gave up her dream. It was due to this test that her chances of being able to study out of state were diminished and also she became less interested in following that dream.
With everyone taking tests around the world, tests to graduate college to getting a license it is not possible for them all to be perfect. For the SAT however its imperfection can be related to how everyone is not given a fair chance to test him or herself. This can be due to a persons background, students parents, or the school that they went to. Or in some cases it could be because not everyone is given an equal starting position to begin with. This is seen when Professor Bronwyn T. Williams explains the situation with his two sons, When I look at my twin sons
. One son excels at taking standardized tests of all kinds by understanding the rhetorical structure of the questions and the institutional demands of the exam. The other, though in some ways a more powerful writer and just as strong a student in school, has always found standardized tests rigid and bewildering (Williams) here two kids with the exact same background have a natural born difference that allows one of them to excel while the other cannot. This is why the SAT is not created as an equal assessment for students. If it were 100% fair then the students that are better at written test taking would take the tests while the students that are more verbal would be given a test that fit them better.
The SAT does not take into account a persons past just what is believed someone at a certain age should know. This does not allow for students of all types to have a fair chance making the standardized test unfair. It also does not take into account a persons home. The reason why this is so important is because there is only one way for any type of student to get into college here in the United States and that is the SAT. So someone from a different country who has been taught a specific way are tested on an entirely different level of cognitive learning.
The way that students study can also be considered unfair because the studying material is expensive by itself, from the prep classes to the study books students are asked to pay for more then just the test. This is not an achievable position for some student because they do not have the money to buy these tools to help themselves. One website article about the SAT Prep classes states that The Ultimate Classroom course can cost as much as $1,199, depending on where youre taking the course (Fiegerman). This shows how much people are willing to pay for the best service possible but it also shows that people with money are able to get more advantages then people with out money. These extra sources of studying give some students an unfair advantage not because they are cheating but because they have these sources available to them. The only solution to solving the problem of this wealth difference is to allow students to have a price that is equal to their wealth. Even if this might lower the amount of profit the creators of the SAT or the prep teachers might get, it would allow for more customers and possibly more money in the long run.
In the end the SAT scores are not looked at the same, even if the numbers might be the exact same, the way that they are looked at are different depending on the student. This is because of a persons or a students cultural background. A persons past has a lot of influence on what the examiners look at in the end. This can be proven by the fact that the government has tried to implement affirmative action programs to help improve the average scores of students. The case that was the start of this action was the Gratz v. Bollinger. In this case a two white male students had been denied admission to the University of Michigan because he did not have enough points. However certain ethnicities were given a starting amount of points because they were different. These are due to that fact that minorities supposedly do not have enough history or background to pass these tests. Not that everyone is in the same predicament. It is just the way that the schools will few the scores of certain individuals.<br>
So with the SAT in such turmoil why do we still use it to such an extent that it is a nationally taken test? It is because it has worked for the past few years as a general assessment even though it has these setbacks. The only way it could be recreated so that it is entirely equal to everyone would be to redo the entire test from top to bottom. This solution is not a plausible idea however it is possible to make it a little bit fairer for everyone. That would be to lower the c costs of either the preparation classes or the study guides that are provided for the students. Or the fact that ethnicity is graded on a different scale should be rearranged so that it is not as unfair as it is. The systems works as it is now but as we develop ourselves further with technology we will need to adapt to a new system of testing one that tests more then just a peculiar part of the mind, or the parts of life we do not use but instead the things that will help us grow and learn from as we move further into the real world.</p>
<p>Work Cited</p>
<p>Fiegerman Seth. SAT Classes: A Price Comparison. Mainstreet Newsletter. Main Street, 2011 Web 08 June, 2010
SAT</a> Classes: A Price Comparison | Education Planning | Money/Investing | Mainstreet</p>
<p>Grove Allen. To How Many Colleges Should I Apply?. About. College Admissions, 2011 Web
To</a> How Many Colleges Should You Apply? This Article Discusses How Many Colleges You Should Apply To</p>
<p>Williams Bronwyn T. Standardized Students: The Problem with Writing for Tests Instead of People. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, October 2005</p>