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Jonathan HellandStandardized tests are a controversial topic in education. Their use is incredibly wide-spread for reasons of convenience, but many people agree that they don’t accomplish what they are supposed to. The SAT, for example, has been shown in many studies to have a stronger correlation with household income than it does with future academic success. Add to that a troubling history of racism and elitism that formed the very foundation of the standardized testing industry, and it’s easy to see why the US education system is steadily moving away from standardized testing.
A further argument can be made that even the very best standardized tests don’t test the right skills. Twin facts—that students generally improve significantly on their second SAT test and that SAT prep classes are effective—provide strong evidence that the main skill being measured is just the skill of taking the exam.
College admission officers and employers both know the value of so-called “soft-skills”—leadership, creativity, critical thinking, flexibility, attitude, social intelligence, and, most of all, perseverance (“grit”) are far more important to success (in both school and life) and far more difficult to test than any of the categories of the SAT. Creativity and innovation, in particular, are impossible to test in any standardized way.
The main reason standardized tests remain relevant is simple—there are currently no good alternatives. Colleges know that the GPA, which represents years of dedicated hard work, is a much better measure of the skills students need—that’s why GPA remains the most important factor in college admissions—but they also know they can’t effectively compare student’s GPAs from two different schools. They can, however flawed, compare two students’ SAT scores and know that they both took essentially the same test in essentially the exact same conditions.
This is exactly why the SAT and the ToEFL are the most important standardized tests—they are the most commonly taken by students in China and the most commonly requested by colleges, therefore they offer the best opportunities for direct comparison between students.
In the end, colleges and standardized tests are stuck with each other, at least for the time being. Chinese students, in particular, need to provide all the evidence they can in the face of the strongest competition of any application pool. Furthermore, Chinese students in general, and BASIS students in particular, tend to have standardized test scores well above the US average, so it usually helps more than it hurts.
This essay has been, so far, very abstract. So I’d like to finish by presenting some direct advice (most of which you’ve probably heard before):
- Follow the testing schedule explained during the standardized testing presentation.
- After 10th grade, make SAT and ToEFL scores a priority.
- When applying to testing optional schools, consider sending your test scores anyway.
- Make sure your application has more to offer than just high test scores.