Views on standardized testing

Standardized testing began in America in the mid-1800s, a practice spurred by leaders’ sincere desire to develop comprehensive, unbiased and uniform measures to compare students from diverse academic backgrounds. After all, it must have been impossible to assess the breadth and depth of a student’s knowledge before schools were given their own standards by the state and federal government. These humble origins gave rise to the exams we are most familiar with today — the SAT and ACT — in the early part of the 20th century.

In today’s results-oriented world, a high school student’s entire academic career revolves around preparing for these high-stakes exams. They will spend hours on end preparing for assessments that test not what they know, but rather how well they prepared for them. They will do so at the expense of (in many cases) studying for their classes, engaging in meaningful extracurricular activities and working part-time.

That is, unless they cannot do so.

Data from the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT, demonstrates the glaring problem of income inequality in standardized testing; the gap between the scores of students from wealthy families (with more than $200,000 in household income) and students from the poorest families (less than $60,000) was more than 300 points on the 2400-point scale. With SAT scores factoring so heavily in admissions and scholarship decisions, wealthier students will be better equipped to gain admission to selective colleges. They’ll also be more likely to receive scholarships to cover those schools’ costs of attendance.

However, as correlation does not prove causation, we cannot merely accept the notion that poorer students will be less likely to succeed on standardized tests as a fact without examining the factors that lead to such a prognosis.

The most obvious factor behind the score discrepancy seems to be that wealthier families can afford private tutoring for their children while many less-affluent families cannot. While this may explain part of the problem, it does not resolve it in its entirety. This issue runs far deeper than the Princeton Review.

The discrepancy is deeply rooted in a family’s standard of living. Wealthy families can choose to live in the best school districts or even send their kids to top private schools, a privilege less-affluent families do not possess. And while the “quality” of the school district alone does not necessitate higher SAT scores, the opportunities provided to the student as a result of the school having more taxpayer dollars to work with sure doesn’t hurt (I use the term quality in quotes, as the term is subjective: some of the best teachers teach at the “worst” districts, and vice versa). More often than not, wealthier parents did well on their standardized exams and are afforded a top education, so they can guide their children in the right direction.

Furthermore, while some affluent students might work by choice, many low-income students work due to necessity. Therefore, these students have less time to engage in test prep — both for the SAT and for school — and in extracurricular activities to bolster their resumes. All of these factors relate to the inequity in college admissions, which, while important, is beyond the scope of this piece.

Personally, there are few things in this world I hate more than standardized testing. As a former East Meadow High School student who did well on these exams, I can confidently say that my successes have much more to do with my socioeconomic status than they do with my intelligence. Please, do not judge yourself, your kids, or others based on these arbitrary, nonsensical exams.

The SAT was once an acronym for Scholastic Aptitude Test; ACT once stood for American College Testing. But both of their names no longer have any meaning: the pretense of the letters being acronyms was dropped years ago.

To almost every student and parent nationwide, the tests themselves have lost their meaning as well.