Reliance on National Test Scores in Admissions - Essay Example

 Reliance on National Test Scores in Admissions These days, standardized tests play a main role in education. In reality, they define students' future, the caliber of college they will go to and, consequently, students' career prospects. The practice of SAT and ACT has ignited a debate on whether these tests are effective and necessary and should be relied on or not. It is not only students that depend on the results they achieve while taking these tests; their teachers and schools also depend on the results as, for example, students' low score can even lead to teacher dismissals and school closing. Overall, standardized tests have a range of serious disadvantages: they are not reliable, they lack content validity and do no measure students' progress. Because of these disadvantages, the full picture of the state of the educational system and students' actual knowledge is distorted, which means colleges should not rely on national test scores in admissions. The first argument which proves that college should not rely on standardized test is the fact that these test are not reliable. In fact, there is a wide range of factors that influence students' results; they are both internal and external. Internal factors are those factors that depend on students only. It is perfectly clear that people differ in the way they perceive and process information, and for some students, it may be difficult to deal with SAT and ACT just because they are presented in the form of tests. Also, depending on a person's temperament, time of information processing changes as well. What is more, while some people are able to deal with pressure they face while completing any important task, such as testing, others are more exposed to stress and cannot complete tests properly even though they have enough knowledge to do it. External factors depend on the character of the tests, on those who compose them, and on the society as a whole. For instance, it is believed that the results of these tests highly depend on a class a student belongs to: the richer the students' parents are, the higher are his / her scores. In addition to this, taking into account high stakes, people try gaming standardized tests, and quite often, they do it criminally. Therefore, there is no guarantee that a student is as good at studying as his / her scores show. The second argument that explains irrelevance of standardized tests is that these tests lack content validity. Content validity is a very important characteristic feature standardized tests should have. It is defined as the extent to which a test represents the content of an area that is measured. SAT and ACT do lack this characteristic feature. The matter is that they leave out a significant portion of material covered while studying. In reality, standardized test do not include questions giving answers to which requires direct application of skills and knowledge. The test disregards mandatory high school topics or just brush upon them without giving students an opportunity to show the actual knowledge they have. There is also a significant number of fields of knowledge that are not checked while passing these tests at all. Finally, college should not rely on national tests because these tests do not measure students' progress. In fact, this argument is closely connected to the previous one. The main task of all the standardized tests taken by students is to measure what things they are able to memorize, not to define if students can apply their abilities and skills to solve a problem or express their opinion. In other words, SAT and ACT measure (quite unreliably, though) students' knowledge of basic things testing of which require the use of memory only, not one's practical skills, critical thinking and problem solving. Apart from that, standardized tests do not cover skills obtained by students with the growth of their life experience, for instance, creativity and team work. That is to say, tests do not allow students express themselves and their abilities to a full extent. That is why if a student does not apply these kinds of things while completing either SAT or ACT, progress measurement is definitely out of the question. At the same time, SAT and ACT do have their advantages due to which colleges continue relying on standardized tests. First of all, they are believed to predict students' future success. SAT and ACT create a standard, measure which is common nation-wide and is more reliable than high school grade point average for the latter depends greatly on schools as well as teachers and their attitudes to work and students and their requirements. That is to say, standardized tests provide consistent assessment. In addition to this, standardized tests are creating better students and better teachers. While completing these tests, students associate their hard work with success and rewards which motivate them to make even more efforts when studying. At the same time, standardized tests motivate teachers to work harder as well. Test also give teachers an opportunity to assess their teaching plans and methods based on students' results and to change and restructure them to meet the needs of students. Finally, standardized testing gives students' parents an idea on how well their children are doing compared to students in other states and across the entire country and shows how well a local school copes with its direct tasks compared to other schools. Despite the advantages standardized tests have, they appear to be ineffective when it comes to assessment of students' knowledge and skills. Standardized tests, such as SAT and ATC, are not reliable; they lack content validity, which means they do not cover the entire curriculum, and do not measure students' actual progress. As many years' experience shows, there is no place for improvement for the efforts made to create tests allow assessing critical thinking and problem solving have led to longer tests only. Due to this, colleges should abolish relying on the results of these tests in admissions so that students have better opportunities for their future careers. Read More