This Saturday, I’m scheduled to take the most dearly loved of standardized tests, the SAT. The point of the SAT is to give colleges an idea of how applicants compare to each other. However, there are so many problems with the test it’s ridiculous. First of all, the test is timed and the time allotted for each section is so short that it only really tests how fast you can answer questions not what you actually know. Second, reading snippets of books or essays and pulling information out of them to answer rhetorical questions as fast as you can is an inane way of discovering how we will do in college. Third, writing an essay in 25 minutes to a broad topic given on the SAT is also an inane way of determining how well we will write in college. Most adults could not score as well as the average teen on these tests, so what exactly are the tests predicting? Teens are tested to death. I think that the SAT should be eliminated. And I’m not just trying to get my Saturday morning back.
I got the worst writing prompt when I took them– lucky me, I, of all people, would get a prompt where I didn’t know the word that I was supposed to write about.