---

(part 2 of 3)

The Pressure of Testing

Hannah: I’m a horrible test-taker. I hate taking tests. In the classroom, I’ll get A’s on homework, participation, everything. And then I’ll take a test and get, like, a D on it, even if I’ve studied for a really long time. So I have to make sure my grade is really high in the class so that when I take my test that it won’t go down too much. But in terms of the standardized testing I still do poorly on those…I got a 23 on the ACT both times I took it, and it was really stressful to think that my GPA was good and everything else was really good, but that my ACT score might hurt my chances of getting into a school.

Anahí: I lived for the last part of elementary, all of middle school and the beginnings of high school in another country where multiple-choice tests are virtually nonexistent. The kind of upbringing educationally that I’ve had was more like a college style. Like, really long essay questions, or just questions you’d have to answer. Tests wouldn’t be 200 questions long, they’d probably be 15, but you’d have to write down what you think and why and back it up.

You have to know how to take the test. There are tricks. I’ve had to learn how to do the tricks and get around the multiple-choice testing thing. In the beginning, I was really bad, because I wouldn’t be able to do it in time, or I’d over-think things. I think that depending on if you’re prepared to take them. Ever since you're little in this system, you're really used to it. You grew up with it, you’ve had it your whole life.

I guess a good and a bad thing is that [standardized tests] ask very pointed questions. You either know it or you don’t know it. I’m a person who might know the whole story, but I’m not very good at specifics. Its not that I don’t know what they’re asking me, it’s just that I don’t know how to best choose my answers. It wouldn’t be technically wrong, but then again, if my teacher would ask, ‘why’d you put this answer,’ I’d give him the whole explanation. Then they’d say, ‘oh, well I understand why you put that in, but the answer was actually this one.’

I transferred, I came in my junior year and I had to take the ACT and SAT. Besides not knowing how the system works, I had to put extra pressure on myself to learn fast, learn what everyone else was kind of getting already used to and preparing for since junior high. And then also get ready to take these huge tests…

They make you feel like, if you get a good test score then it’s perfect-—you know, every door is open to you. If you get a lower score, you feel like a failure…you get stressed. For me, it wasn’t exactly a good experience. I’m not saying that multiple-choice tests are bad, but I think that they don’t exactly show the potential of a student.

Hannah: Yeah, like my friend got a 27 on the ACT and she has a lot lower of a GPA than I did. So I feel like it doesn’t accurately show what a student can do in the classroom.

Lakshmi: Standardized tests in general, I think very few people have a good experience with them in this country. And I think for the fraction of people who do get from a 30 to a 36 on the ACT-—yes, they’re intelligent, they’re book smart, sure. But that only translates to one area of their knowledge or one level of their capabilities.

A lot of pressure is put on [testing] because you're told that the default for college admissions is going to be your standardized test scores…For a lot of kids, it becomes a barrier for going wherever you want to. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, because I’m pretty sure that the history of standardized test taking would show us that it was created for completely alternative purposes than grading the entire youth population to determine the rest of their lives.

Anahí: My expression is through speaking or enacting things, or stuff like that, so if I’m asked to write or to fill in a bubble, it doesn’t really help me get across as well.

I don’t know if any of you guys have done interviews with your colleges, but I have, because I know that my scores aren’t exactly good. But I know that I relate well to people and I know that if I sit there with someone I can show them how much I know how potential I have. I can show them the other side that they won’t see through numbers. Maybe I don’t have the highest scores, and maybe I don’t have the numbers required for a certain college, but they would see that I am not someone that’s not prepared, or someone who’s not capable of taking the pressures or the requirements that they’re asking. I think that that’s kind of left to the side with those kind of tests.

Lakshmi: Plus, colleges don’t see the way that you prepare for tests. For SAT and ACT, I didn’t take any type of test prep…But one of my friends had a tutor since sophomore year preparing for these tests. It sounds ridiculous to a lot of kids, but after he got a 35 on the ACT, he was sitting pretty on top of his high GPA and his good test scores, and applying to the country’s top universities.

The problem with the test scores is that they’re not a very good indicator of what kind of a person you are, how you do in your classes, what you do in your classes. There’s all kinds of academic dishonesty in high schools that colleges don’t see, that teachers don’t even see. Standardized tests fool colleges into thinking that people are a certain kind of student.

Eliot: I went into my college process as the eldest child not knowing much about what colleges look at first. My only experience with college is what they say on the websites. I would look at the websites before applying to a school and I was thinking about it already before taking my tests junior year. It looked like a lot of the colleges didn’t value standardized testing as the top thing. Most of the colleges had the high school GPA as the very top thing, then your essays and then the standardized testing. It’s not the final judge of your character or intelligence. I don’t know if it’s a preliminary criterion.

Lakshmi: If your test scores aren’t up to their average or their mid-fiftieth percentile, you’d better be stellar in something else.

Eliot: They always give you a spot, if you have something that seems out of place like a low test score, to explain it. You can say that you’re a bad test taker, that ‘over the years, as you see, I have a strong GPA, I have this course of knowledge. But, I always struggled to take the tests. I’ve met with my teachers about this, the school knows about my problem,’ something like that. There is room for explanations.

When I filled out my college profiles, I did put forward a rather broad aspect of myself. I wasn’t just a number. I wasn’t just what I scored on the SAT. I was the kid who wrote these essays that had certain people recommend him and had a GPA from high school.

Roosevelt, the [junior] high school in River Forest, forces their kids to take standardized testing as placement in junior high. That’s one of those horrible uses of standardized testing. I feel that it has very little place in placement in the classroom. But I had to prepare a student for the last month and a half [for the exam].

Lakshmi: We have math, reading and science placement for your honors track, just in case your teachers don’t recommend you. It’s a very similar kind of standardized testing thing. It’s becoming increasingly important. We’re identifying the education gap here at our school, and its becoming the basis and the platform to identify academic performance overall, rather than GPA, rather than classes taken.

Advanced placement examinations in this school are supposed to measure how well a class is taught. For example, our language classes here. Even though people are semi-fluent by the time they take the highest-level class, performance on the advanced placement tests are horrendous in the languages. Horrendous in Spanish, French, pretty much all around. They’re terrible. And no one can identify what the specific factor is.

Eliot: The language tests are the hardest.

Lakshmi: Yes. And the administration, the first finger they point is towards the teachers, but perhaps it’s not necessarily there. Perhaps it’s in the fact that even if you take a language for your entire schooling career, if you compound all of the time that you’ve taken the language, it probably surmounts to about four weeks of language. Do they really expect a student to be completely fluent in four weeks?

Hannah: I took it from kindergarten to my junior year. And I’m still not fluent.

Anahí: I can understand why they’d need [standardized tests] for big things, because there are thousands of people.

Lakshmi: It’s easy to see why we need a numerical standard by which to base this. Obviously we can’t have an essay for everything.

Justin: No matter if I score a one or a 36 [on the ACT], I know that I’m capable of doing whatever it is I put my mind to…I don’t feel like standardized tests correctly judge your ability to break down situations and perform at your highest level.

To me, it doesn’t matter if I go to Harvard or if I go to Triton, [the local community college]. Anything that anybody would want to do, it depends on how you apply yourself in a situation and how much experience you have in a situation.

The quality of education means nothing. You can go to Harvard and still be a homeless person on the street. You can go to Triton and be one of the richest people in the world.

The Achievement Gap & Are the Tests Biased? >>