If you’re a junior or senior, chances are you have taken the ACT or SAT at least once. If you are an American student in general, you have definitely taken some form of standardized test- remember all those “state testing” days? Performance on these tests is so valued that teacher’s salaries, administrative jobs, and the overall amount of funding some schools receive are dependent on high scores. High schoolers have left behind those days, but even scarier tests have replaced them. Tests that determine admission into college, money for college, and, for some students, determine how intelligent they consider themselves. They are so ubiquitous that our own high school offers juniors a free ACT. Those scores recently came back, and it got me thinking: what’s the point of all of these tests?
Yes, I’m being serious. Besides being an unpleasant rite of passage for high schoolers, why do we continue to pour our money and our Saturdays into testing? If it’s really just about college, why are almost all higher education institutions test-optional? And does it truly help any student?
Like most things, it’s complicated. There are some benefits to standardized tests, and there are several drawbacks. For one, the ACT and SAT are both, well, standardized. That means an outside institution that doesn’t know you scores your test, which is the exact same copy as everyone else under the exact same conditions at the same time. While GPAs are calculated in innumerable ways across the country, and reflect lots of bias, grade inflation, and uneven access to more advanced classes like APs, ACT/SAT scores are supposedly fair. Supposedly, because some schools (like ours) offer free test prep courses and some students (like ours) have access to outside test tutoring resources and can afford to take it multiple times. This isn’t the norm. That disparity is most obvious in this statistic: in 2022, Vestavia Hills High School had the third-highest ACT average in the state, averaging 24.4 against the national average of 19.8. Perhaps Vestavia students are just naturally smarter and better at taking tests than everyone else; most likely they have far more resources than the average Alabama or American student.
Another advantage of tests that is often touted by test prep websites and CollegeBoard is that they show which areas need improvement. That’s all well and good, except students don’t work harder in math class to improve their math scores. They work harder at test prepping for the math section. Instead of understanding more math, they memorize a few formulas and practice what’s likely to be on the test, only to forget it the next day. Also, how does that help students who can’t retake the ACT or SAT? They can improve in that area all they want to, but colleges won’t see that. It’s almost like these companies want people to keep retaking and retaking their tests so they can get more and more money from them.
All of that aside, I believe that the biggest problem with standardized tests is the comparison game played by everyone. The reality is that ACT and SAT scores are really easy metrics to compare students by: everyone scores on the same scale, and everyone knows what each score means. Admissions officers can take one look at an application and assume they know what kind of student they are dealing with based on the test score alone. The issue with that is obvious. A test score simply cannot capture every facet of a student. By design, it can only tell how well someone takes tests. Each student is entirely unique and unquantifiable in their drive, their work ethic, and their approach to learning- three things that are crucial to success in college and beyond. Further, it breaks my heart when students compare each other’s intelligence based on ACT scores. They are two totally unrelated things. In the end, standardized tests are good for the businesses that give them out, and they are good for admissions officers that don’t have the time or effort to delve deeply into each application. Whether they are beneficial to you, personally, is up in the air. But either way, no matter how high you score, contributing to a system that is rigged towards wealth and resources, that emphasizes comparison, and pretends to tell you all you need to know about yourself, is a difficult choice to make.
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