“Of 2.25 million SATs taken every year, about 1,000 scores are withdrawn for misbehavior, 99% of which are for copying,” Tom Ewing, an Educational Testing Service spokesman, told The New York Times last September. This statistic not only reveals how prevalent cheating on standardized tests is, but also how much pressure high school students are faced with.
Now more than ever, educators need to realize this pressure and work to alleviate it. To me, the most effective (albeit drastic) solution is to eliminate the SAT altogether. This test does more harm than good; the stress and anxiety it causes does permanent psychological damage to the nation’s students. Finding a college should be a happy and exciting time in a teenager's life, not something they dread because of the SATs.
Beginning as early as freshmen year of high school, they are trained on how to take the SAT and what scores they will need to get into what college. Students are essentially given an ultimatum: Get a 2,300 and you’ll get into an Ivy League, and thus a wonderful life post-graduation; get anything less, and you’ll end up at a dead-end community college with no future. While this is a gross exaggeration, it is the stress-induced mentality of so many high school students across the U.S. Standardized testing and a student’s future have become so intertwined as getting into college has become increasingly difficult.
There are several other factors as to why the SAT has been put on a pedestal. Competitive, status-conscious parents put a premium on getting into elite academic institutions. The ongoing economic recession, which has left parents feeling like their jobs and financial future are in jeopardy, is also making them more eager than ever for their children to get score-based scholarships. Moreover, teachers, whose job evaluations increasingly depend on test results, are an added source of pressure.
These varying factors at play, coming from all sides of their lives no less, leave students feeling hopeless. If they can’t learn “how” to take a standardized test or simply aren’t academically up to par with some of their peers, what option do they have left? For them, cheating seems to be the only path left to getting a college degree and subsequently a decent job.
Speaking from personal experience, the SAT was a nightmare for me. I was in the top 5% of my grade, yet my SAT scores were...less than wonderful. I essentially had to jump through hoops to reach the score my choice of colleges deemed worthy: I had an SAT tutor for several months, I had to re-take the test, and I had to attend multiple training classes. It was expensive to say the least.
Luckily, I was financially able to get through this hellish process. However, many in a similar situation simply can’t afford it. Private tutors can cost up to $4,000 and classes up to $1,000, according to the New York Times. On top of all this, the test itself has several fees such as registration and printing. For students who can only afford the bare minimum, cheating is a viable option. Whether paying another student to take the test for them or paying for answers, cheating seems to be the less expensive option than tutoring classes.
Eliminating this stressful, and quite frankly, painful process would help students see the road to college in a different light. Rather than focusing on the immense pressures and destroyed dreams, students could actually focus on the college’s actual attributes and the opportunities of attending. A student’s academic intelligence can’t be summed up in a three-hour test; forcing them to endure such an anxiety makes what should be an exciting experience a dreadful one.
Photo Credit: Newton Free Library
The Discussion
It may be elitist, but I think we're far too focused on "college for everybody" in this country. Not every kid is linear or a scholar; not every kid can do college-level work or will be happy in a white-collar or professional job; and college is no longer a guarantee of a"good job" and a "good income" as it was in the 50s. What we should be doing is helping each individual kid discover his strengths and gifts and how to make a living from them.
I agree that the SAT is a problem, but it falls into the subset of problems raised by every standardized test. In essence, I agree with your thesis, but not your reasoning. I am much less concerned about pressure on high school students, and much more concerned about issues surrounding standardized testing as an idea. It gives us an inaccurate picture of real student performance, has a notable bias based on race/socio-economic status due to content exposure, and does not give an accurate depiction of the whole student. I am much more inclined to agree with a portfolio model for college admission, that forces admission committees to look at the whole student. We should get rid of the SAT, but not due to cheating and pressure.
In light of increasing global competition, America's high school students should be getting more competitive and pressurized, not less so. However, emphasis should be shifted from SAT to AP/IB programs, which save money by enabling early graduation and also present knowledge useful for college.
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I will say that there seems to be more pressure now as opposed to when I went through the process, but I don't think it begins or ends with the SAT's. It may have something to do with a more insecure time of history, or that enough is never enough. It seems that some people have become successful without attending an Ivy League School, and that there is a certain irony when a generation seems to attack the trappings of success while desperately attempting to achieve those same trappings for themselves.
Not everyone needs to attend college, and that includes "you". People can be happy without every becoming Time's "Person of the Year".
Perhaps the pressure is based on unrealistic perceptions that we can all be Chiefs and no Indians.
It sounds like you put a ton of time into your studies...How would you justify eliminating the SAT (as a 3-hour equalizer of sorts) to a student who is unable to invest the time required for a 5% class rank due to sports, other extracurricular activities, or a personal/family commitment?
Much of the SAT is just an intelligence test mascarading as a knowledge test. The SAT doesn't really know what it wants to be.
In my mind, the best approach to college admissions would be a dual approach. One knowledge test (writing, math, history, vocab, and other basic knowledge) and one intelligence test (typical IQ test questions + reading comprehension). An IQ test provides colleges with an assessment of the applicant's POTENTIAL.
The LSAT is a good example of a test that measures intelligence instead of knowledge.
"People say 'I'm not a good test taker.' Oh, you struggle with that part where we find out what you know? I can totally relate see, because I'm a brilliant painter minus my god awful brushstrokes." - Daniel Tosh
The SAT is but one piece of the very ugly gauntlet of stress our HS students must run to get into college. The pressure to produce a dossier of accomplishments in an array of venues is a disgrace; especially when one considers that much of the energy expended is waste, contibutes little to actual intellectual development, and preparation for college and life.
1 Replies
I concur with the previous comments. The source of the stress is not the SAT itself, but the fabricated mindset that one's entire future success is determined by where one matriculates. Nothing could be further from the truth. Are successful Harvard grads made successful because they went to Harvard, or because Harvard has a finely honed formula for selecting successful individuals from among their applicants? I'm inclined to believe the latter.
If you want to stop student cheating, stop rewarding adults for similar behavior. Students are encouraged to cheat when they see members of Congress and the administration cheating on their taxes without penalty.
They are encouraged to cheat when they see criminals, from illegal aliens to rapists and murders getting off with little or no penalty by playing the system, pleading hardship, or convincing activists they were victims of bias.
Part of the problem is too many years of "pressure avoidance" by schools, parents, and students. Rather than spending their educational years taking tests that give accurate results of learning and assessment of progress, students are given "participation awards". For many, the SAT may be the first "make or break" test they have to take, and it is a shock.
Stop coddling them in the early years, and the SAT won't be a problem.
It's nice to blame the SAT for the pressure of college admissions, but if it were gone the pressure would simply transfer somewhere else. The underlying source of the pressure is the competition among those 2.25M students for a limited number of places at colleges they want to go to and that is real not manufactured. To get rid of pressure, you'd have to convince students that what college they attend doesn't matter.
I'm dumbfounded by this article. It's hard to see how 0.04% is a "prevalent" amount of cheating. And what evidence is there that the SAT causes "permanent psychological damage" to students? Why would you think high school students have a "stress-induced mentality" that leads them to the absurd false dilemma of Ivy League or bust? There are so many colleges in the United States with a broad spectrum of "eliteness," and I was acutely aware of this in high school. Also, what kind of teacher's performance "increasingly depend[s] on" SAT scores--SAT tutors? And if a student is not "academically up to par" with their peers, why should they be focused on college, the quintessentially academic experience?
Firs of all, I'm not a fan of the SAT. You claim that 0.04% of SATs are "withdrawn for misbehavior". That's irrelevant. With the competition in admissions today, you have to ask yourself, what's the alternative? There has to be a standard, or colleges would be relying their decisions off much more spurious information with nothing to base it off. Secondly, not everyone should need to go to college. Trade professions are a necessary alternative.