My stance/opinion on standardized tests is one that is constantly fluctuating. Over the past few years they have come under fire for being biased or unfair, and at first that notion seemed ridiculous to me. How can a standardized test, be biased at all. The different forms of the test are random, but it is basically the same test around the country, on very general fields of study that everyone goes through. How could it possibly be biased or even unfair?
The pandemic shut down a lot of ACT and SAT testing capabilities over the past couple years, resulting in colleges having to consider students that have not been able to take the test. Most became test-optional, meaning that you could still submit a standardized test if you wanted to, but it would not necessarily hurt you if you did not. We don’t really have a way to know if that is completely truthful, but it seems most stuck to their word on that. Many top end schools did not do this, but the vast majority of colleges in America did, which has in turn made standardized tests as a whole a lot less crucial in the college decision process.
This is good news for those opposed to standardized tests, but let’s dive into why they are getting a bad reputation. Research has shown that the scores students get on these tests have troubling correlation to family income, gender, race, and ethnicity. This is mostly the result that students in higher income areas have access to more education materials than other students do, resulting in their scores increasing. Also, since tests cost significant money to take, those in higher income families can take the test more than once, also improving their odds.
Does this mean that the tests themselves are necessarily unfair? No not really. But does it mean that the nature of how students prepare for these tests and the resources they have access to are unfair? Definitely. So the question then becomes, is there any way to get around these barriers. Will standardized testing ever be as important as it once was, or is that going to fade and then disappear forever.
If standardized tests were ever able to come back, I think a few crucial changes would have to be made. For one, make the tests themselves free. They should be provided by the students school, and should be online so that paper cost is not a money factor. Make the limit a student can take each test a max of 3 times, with their highest being counted and the other 2 completely ignored. Also, more practice tests would have to be created. I think if all of these were successfully implemented, the merit of standardized tests would return, because there is benefits to such tests. The benefit meant to be that since different schools have different teachers and quite frankly, different teaching capabilities and class difficulties, standardized tests are a way to compare every student across the world regardless of their pre-collegiate schooling.
I would argue that these test should not go away completely, but some essential changes are definitely in order.
Standardized tests is an interesting phenomenon to me, while I understand how to does a great job of predicting college success in some cases, it is not for all. First of all the stress these test induce are substantial, the score you receive will effect the rest of your life in some way or another. Combine this with being early in the morning is confusing in itself. Why should someone struggling with stress and lack of sleep on a random Sunday afternoon decide if you’re good enough to get admission to ones dream university. While the future is unknown it will be interesting to see were standardized tests go in the future.