Essay On Should Standardized Testing Be Abolished

By the time spring comes around, students have two things on their minds- summer and, sadly, standardized tests. Annually, around one million students take the ACT and SAT- even if they do not plan on attending college. Although the SAT and ACT are required, recently some colleges are saying they are not looking at the tests scores as much as they are looking at everything else. The tests should not be able to determine the student's academic abilities. Standardized testing should be abolished because a lot of money is wasted, a lot of time is wasted and they shouldn’t determine how ‘smart’ a student is. The SAT and ACT are tests required to be taken by students, whether they plan on going to college or not. The government and certain companies spend millions of dollars for the test to be taken, they are tests to determine your academic abilities and some colleges reference them when you
All year, every year, students and teachers prepare for the SAT and ACT, but why? David Schmid, the principal at Basalt High School states, “The testing is not the final, end all measure of how students and teachers are doing.” Honestly, the majority of the students who prepare to take this test only know one-fourth of the material on the test, the rest is just guessing and memorization, but memorizing is not the same thing as learning. If these tests are the two major things that colleges look at then what is the point of going through four years of highschool trying to make grades if it comes down to the student guessing most of the answers on the tests? The tests do not acknowledge how well a student does in school. A student’s academic ability should not be determined by two tests, it should be determined by how well the student did all throughout high