It reverberated through the hallways of the high school like a well-known chant. Everyone asked it so much that, eventually becoming the newest catchphrase. Forget about,”A bigger bang for your buck.” Or “Yadda, Yadda, Yadda”. Even the classic pickup line,”What’s your sign?”, trembles at the mere mention of it. Make room for the king of all mantras. But I refused answer to it. At the smallest reference to the question, I felt an overwhelming sense of dread flood me. Like a deer in the headlights, I was too anxious to adequately create an answer. I would do anything else than face the question,”What’s your SAT score?” And today was the day the all-important scores were released. Of course, today had to be the day! Everyone around me cheerfully …show more content…
During a heated argument with her, she impassionedly retorted,”Look! These scores don’t define you! You are more than a writing on a piece of paper!” And, in a moment of revelation, I finally understood the profundity of her central point: test scores don’t define you as an individual. From that time on, I decided to stop letting these numbers define me. After all, there were just numbers! Why did I allow them to consume my being? The cancerous tumor of self-hatred that churned and boiled in my brain dissipated into a feeling of pure ecstasy and release. I found her within the flurry of happiness and bliss. I found myself. Finally, I was me again. My drive, once produced from a fear of failure, transformed into an ambition to do well for myself. I wanted to be happy. But how? From that point on, I made a promise to be kinder to myself. I no longer based my value as an individual on the numbers I get on a standardized test. I no longer harass myself with the “undeniable knowledge” that academics make or break me. There is so much more to me than “writing on a piece of paper”. I am more than my test scores. I am my talents, my passions, and my drive. I. Am.
While sitting at my desk in a classroom overflowing with colorful decorations, my 1st grade classmates and I were taught how to add and subtract. At that moment, I had no idea that numbers would soon become one of the biggest factors in my life. Before I knew it, my journey as a number on a sheet of paper began. From third grade to my senior year of high school, I have been tested in every way, shape, and form and compared to kids all around the country. My test scores decided if I was able to move on to the next grade, what classes I took, and will soon factor into what college I will be attending. Those numbers have seemingly been the determinant in how successful I have been academically and how successful I am expected to be. Numbers even
While reading Ken Bain’s book “What the Best College Students Do” of the five different types of students he describes, I feel like I fall under the label of one having mediocre grades but achieving success. I make good grades, however I do not necessarily believe my grades always reflect my hard work, determination and effort put in, similar to his theory on false hope in standardized testing. Throughout my school career, I have consistently made A and B grades. I can remember only one C grade, which was a quarter grade, and very disappointing, but a lesson learned. At the same time though, and as Bain helped me realize through his text, grades are not everything and making a C is not something that is going to kill me; there is simply more to school than a letter grade. In fact he points out through most of the 1800s schools only used two grades, pass or fail. As seen nowadays, schools have since adopted the letter grade system.
Despite having above-average grades, I lacked any of the pride and confidence other students carried. Despite having a group of trustworthy friends, the feelings of disappointment kept me feeling isolated and miserable. A teenager who deep inside, kept dreaming of myself with great academic potential while failing to prove anything to anyone. As the ten minute mark has passed in the AP testing room, I remember the sensation of deep frustration, a feeling of desperate anger to change something. At that brief moment I felt a successful score on the AP World History test would be my salvation, the ultimate test of resolve. Thus my mind started to naturally channel the frustration into deep concentration: my mind quickly adapted into competitive overdrive. For the first time in my academic experience, I found the will to break the influence of testing
Parents and professors speculate why children no longer display excitement and ambition for learning. Most share the common goal of educating the youth to take on the “rights and responsibilities of citizens” (Ravitch 109). Unfortunately, educational requirements have strayed from the original purpose and began to aim their attention toward the “importance” of standardized testing. As a current high school senior, my experience has been that students are branded by their grades and test scores as if they determine who we are as a person. Diane Ravitch’s “The Essentials of A Good Education”, successfully critiques the extensive use of standardized testing in order to pursue change in our education systems and prove that focusing on test scores corrupts a child’s inner creativity.
“It’s not my fault, but it is my future.” This statement was a common theme throughout Jullien Gordon’s talk, ‘The Other 4.0’. I attended Jullien Gordon’s presentation last Thursday, and with full confidence I can say that it was one of the most inspiring, as well as informative, speeches I have ever heard. He talked to us about, how having a 4.0 GPA is wonderful and certainly honorable, but in the real world no one is going to care about how perfect your GPA was in Undergraduate and Graduate school. Professionals hiring you for jobs are going to care about your accomplishments outside of the classroom as well. While I was sitting listening to Gordon speak, I couldn’t help but notice that it was ironic that I was attending this presentation
She recalls the struggles, the fun, her failures and even her success in the end (Harding, 2011). The personal story shows the real road it takes with decisions we make “when entering college, Harding wrote that she began college because she felt it was expected of her”(Harding, 2011). College students often make choices based on what they perceive as pressure to do so by others like councilors, parents and even society. They enter college thinking this is what my plan should look like and not making choices that are the best for them. Harding said that in the end “ we all become graduates of one of the finest universities in the world- and already, nobody much cared how we got there”(Harding,2011). To me this shows that even if you pass by the skin of your teeth, you can still fail in the end. A diploma is not the end result that maters the most. Students need to choose colleges that appeal to their needs and goals and not just go to get a diploma. If students spend no time studying weather boarded or not liking their studies, then what difference does the diploma make in the end. Students would just have a degree that often goes unused in life but the costs is ever mounting to these students. The financial cost, the cost of failure, loss of energy and time, causes many students to never finish their education or even to avoid going in the
Whether we realize it or not, test scores play a vital role in many people’s self esteem. A person who frequently scores high will be confident that they are very intelligent and will expect others to see them that way. Asimov attested to this when he stated, “All my life I’ve been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I’m highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think that too.” (Asimov, 536). On the other hand, those who score low on tests often write themselves off to be unintelligent. Emphasis on the importance of the ACT or SAT test scores can lead an adolescent to conclude that he or she is not capable of succeeding in college and lead them to not pursue higher education. The tragedy is that we may pass on opportunities because we have labelled ourselves unintelligent based on a test score which is not a true refelection of our
1. In Manhattan Review, I got the best tips in SAT during training whose usefulness resulted in my score of 2350. I'm thankful to my parents, I enrolled into the right institute.
On the standardized tests I think that I do pretty well because I always answer the question even if I do not really know the answer I try to think on something that can give me unless a half of a point. I always have been that way because if I think about I always try to do my best on tests because I think they are important. I prepare myself for a standardized test by paying attention on the subject that we are studying or we had been studying so it would make my understanding more easy and listening to the teacher when they tell us that we are going to have a standardized test because they kind of tell us what is going to be about. What do I do for the night before the standardized test is that I try to study everything or the most important
If someone asked me where I am going to be in ten years, this would be my answer. I will have a great, high-paying job, and beautiful wife and family, and a nice sports car parked in front of my lovely house. When I look into the future, I see myself being successful and happy. Even though I always pictured myself this way, I never worried too much about how I would get there. I feel the Suffolk University can lay the groundwork for making these dreams into reality.
Dedication is a trait that I established growing up. Whether it was through school, playing soccer, or even hobbies of mine, I was always dedicated through any task. I have always been the type of person to keep going when even when times got difficult, and that’s exactly what I did in two situations of receiving my first fail in a class and scoring low on my SAT composite scores. Bad grades and bad tests scores were two things that I always wanted to avoid but unfortunately that was something I got to experience. Receiving my first F in a class and a 1360 as my highest SAT composite score was something that broke my heart. Nevertheless, I refused to let that get the best of me and I was determined to work harder and harder.
The SAT’s Effectiveness The SAT is the most widely accepted college admissions test; approximately two million students take it each year. The current SAT measures a student’s masteryin three core topics: English, Math, and Writing. The English section of the SAT is a multiple-choice test whichcovers vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar, and literary analysis. The math test is multiple choice as well as student-produced response, where no answer choices are given but rather students can fill in bubbles for values 0-9999 and thus similar to an open-ended question.
“Our educational goal [is] the production of caring, competent, loving, lovable people” . The students found in the schools across the United State are the future of America. They are the doctors, teachers, business people, lawyers and many other roles, that will be out in the workforce in the years to come. What they learn in school will impact them immensely; it is the responsibility of a teacher to give students the best education in order to ensure the common good of the future. It is essential for students to not only learn content matter, but also the skills to enable them to participate in a democracy. Due to standardized testing, the emphasis of education has become on score and rankings rather than learning. A standardized test does not look at the whole student, the scores provided are on a very narrow aspect of education. In the classroom, there are countless ways for teachers to assess the student as a whole person not as just a score. Standardized tests scores should not be the sole criteria for determining a student’s academic achievement.
I’ve encountered Let’s Get Ready SAT program through school and my fellow high school peers on Facebook. As I was learning about the Let’s Get Ready program offers to junior students, I was astonished and knew I had to take advantage of this program. I am a 16-year-old junior in high school and the first man in my generation who is looking forward to attending college. As I was learning about the Let’s Get Ready program offers to junior students, I was astonished and knew I had to take advantage of this program. Over the years, the SAT guidelines and the accordance rates have changed, colleges acceptance rates has gotten competitive, because they are demanding more from students. Therefore, this is essential to me because I want to be prepared
Sit & Reach test is the test to check how athlete’s flexibility of the lower back and hamstring is developing.