When I started my senior year of high school, I kept hearing the same things about college admissions over and over again, as I’m sure everyone else did as well. Focus on your essay. Take hard classes. Go visit campuses. Schedule interviews. Teachers, guidance counselors, and my concerned parents repeated all of that time and time again. But, one thing was repeated above all else: whatever you do, for the love of God and everything else, do well on your tests. To my parents, these standardized tests were the biggest part of the process. They were, in their eyes, tremendously important.
These tests, apparently, boil down what you are as a student. Take the ACT, for example. This test is based on math and science and squeezes hours of testing into a number up to 36. Based on that number, for some students, it could be the difference between getting accepted or denied by your dream college. That’s supremely unfair to base a student’s success on one or two tests taken randomly throughout their senior year. In my opinion, it is completely ridiculous.
Just think. In applying to colleges, you look at their information, previous class profiles, acceptance rates, diversity, etc. You find that most people who got into X college got a 29 on their ACTs and a combined 1830 on their SATs. Now, suppose that X college is the college that you’ve been dying to go to. The college where you can see yourself spending the next four years. It would make you pretty nervous, right? THIS is the situation that people are dealing with. Anxious high school seniors are frantically preparing to take a standardized test that, for some reason, is given a huge weight by some colleges in their selection process. Now, imagine that, because of these reasons, nerves or otherwise, the student doesn’t do well. Imagine, even though they are a strong student, robust GPA, extracurricular involvement, an athlete, they don’t get accepted to X college because of this one test.
This is the reason why test-optional and test exempt schools are important. With these schools, unfair tests are taken out of the equation, and admissions offices now can focus on the student. It is how the system should be, because the focus on tests is eliminated, student applications now raise in quality, and much more focus is placed on what the student does in his or her spare time. Even though the amount of applications may decrease, the quality increases, and with that, the quality of the student. This is a change for the better. This is a model that schools should follow. Avoid the test scores, and focus on the students. Students are not just walking test scores, they are people, and it is time that the focus on tests should change.