At some point in every person’s life, they’ve dreamed of achieving perfection. Whether it’s getting straight A’s in school, being the perfect daughter or son, being a star athlete, or being the most popular, everyone’s always basically been trying to be the best at something. This could start from a young age when you feel the need to compete friends, siblings, classmates, or really anyone. The issue starts to become really prominent the older children get, during elementary school children already start competing to make travel teams for sports, high honor music program, please your parents, get high grades on standardized tests from when you’re in third grade, and have the most friends. This again continues in middle school when girls start …show more content…
Recently, there’s been more of a distaste of standardized tests and many children have actually been opting out of the tests. 70% of educators, who are the ones administering the tests feel that the state standardized testing is detrimental to the development of young children. Therefore, I’d like to research whether these children end up feeling much less overwhelmed and therefore have much better mental health than those who are taking the tests and how their development compares to those who are taking the tests. There has also been a new idea coming about in which colleges are straying away from looking at your SAT’s or ACT’s and instead look into their applicants work over time in their high school grades and their resume. I think this is definitely much less stressful for kids because rather than having just one defining test grade that really makes or breaks you, colleges are instead just seeing an average grade you’ve gotten over time and won’t know about those times when you got a bad grade and didn’t do good as you hoped. Nearly half of high school students have reported feeling stressed due to these standardized tests and the college application process and I’d like to know if those who know that a test optional school is the place for them feel less stressed than those who don’t plan on attending