Should colleges put less emphasis on standardized tests?
Standardized testing is something that all high school students rave about and is a hot topic among many members of the College Admission Boards and critics alike. Standardized testing has been in use since the mid 1800’s, and colleges continue to accept thousands of high-school students into their schools based on their standardized testing scores(Pro/Con). Some think the emphasis on SAT scores is the correct approach for admission processes with a view that standardized aptitude test results and their relative scoring provide an insight into the relative knowledge and/or skills of a student. Others, like The National Center for Fair and Open Testing and me, are of the view that we just view the students as “products of pen and paper tests,” and that these tests eliminate what makes one person unique from another, which is actually what college should be about (SME
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A few examples of these would include events called “Hackathons” in which students from all around the nation meet in places to do hands-on programming activities and interact with one-another while having a great time and learning (MIT Newsroom). Other activities such as medical clinics and shadowing doctors being available would help students see how they would do in a medical field based on interactions and what they witness from patients (MIT Newsroom). These hands-on experiences that students had in high school would make them better college students because of the way they can interact and the specific roles they could take on as young students. The point of standardized testing isn’t the only way we could compare students; we can still holistically focus on their grade point average in high school, the difficulty of their situations, and the extracurricular intangibles that make the students the individuals that they