The Opportunity To Ban The SAT Is Here

Melanie Arougueti/Staff Writer

During this global pandemic, new and alternate ways to learn have appeared. Many students are doing school online, attending video chats and organizing themselves with outlines and lists of work. People have realized that some of the contrivances we had in place aren’t as necessary as they may seem. 

The SAT is one of them. 

According to the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, standardized tests like the SAT and the ACT were made to compare students’ content mastery. And while they are given to students nationwide, the ASCD goes on to explain that “standardized achievement tests should not be used to evaluate the quality of education.” 

Standardized testing doesn’t show a student’s strengths to the best of their ability. It shows if they answer enough math problems and read passages in a certain amount of time. It doesn’t show the strengths they learned in art or creative writing classes, whether or not they are multilingual and how efficient they can be handling many tasks at the same time. Students should be given a better chance to present their strengths to universities all across the nation. 

One alternative to standardized testing would be conducting one-on-one interviews. This would create more recruitment jobs in universities while also giving students the chance to defend their transcripts and explain why they should be accepted into their university of choice. Even for the higher-end institutions that—for better or worse—seek to limit entry to only a select few, this method would still allow for strict evaluation. 

Some countries like Argentina accept all students who graduated high school, believing that teenagers shouldn’t be judged during possibly the most complicated stage of their lives and that everyone deserves a chance. This is much better than determining a student’s intelligence from an exam they took once or twice. 

As teenagers, high school students don’t always make the best decisions. Their brains haven’t fully developed and they are acting as seventeen year olds do, with their hormones being unpredictable. Therefore, whether or not to remove the SAT and ACT should be an ethical question as well. Is it truly fair to put this much pressure on a teen and have an exam determine where they will be for four consecutive years?

Many countries dislike standardized testing and do not promote it in their university process. According to the Washington Post, Finland does not expect its high school students to complete any equivalent of the SAT in order to apply to universities and bans this type of testing altogether. Finland is known for having a very good education system. Why? Because their teachers are paid significantly and students are taught to learn without the competition that arises in American schools via standardized testing. 

People in the United States make comparisons between schools, placing pressure on students. Those who get accepted into Ivy League schools and universities that make the acceptance rate exclusive are held in higher regard than those who attended community college. 

Universities should ban the SAT, and the idea that students need to compete to go on furthering their education. Hopefully, future students won’t have to know what acronyms like SAT and ACT stand for.

Featured image by Judit Klein on Flickr.

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