If you don’t get a good score on the SAT, you won’t make it into college.
That’s the very thought that loomed above many of our heads when we were once high school students.
Some of students, myself included, found a loophole to avoid the SAT: the ACT.
“The SAT and SAT Subject Tests are a suite of tools designed to assess your academic readiness for college,” reads the College Board website.
Many people and studies argue that the SAT fails to measure what it claims to, though.
John Katzman, founder of the Princeton Review, a company that specializes in test preparation, called the SAT a scam that’s only good for tricking students and separating them in an interview with PBS.
“The SAT is a bad test. It is biased. It measures nothing. And we should get rid of it,” he said.
Although he harshly criticizes the test, he said the Princeton Review doesn’t try to teach and help with test material; rather, it coaches students on test-taking techniques.
In 2009, Wired.com reported that the test-preparation industry makes $4 billion a year from classes, books, tutors, and software.
But, what about the other measures some are resorting to for a stellar score?
In the 2004 movie “The Perfect Score,” six high school seniors break into the Educational Testing Service (ETS) building in order to steal the answers to their upcoming SAT test. Granted, the likelihood of this occurring off of a film set and in real life may be slim to none, but the general notion of cheating on the test is not.
ETS spokesman Tom Ewing said “of 2.25 million SATs taken every year, about 1,000 scores are withdrawn for misbehavior, 99 percent of which are for copying,” reported The New York Times.
Tuesday, six Long Island high school students were arrested and charged with misdemeanors for paying a college student, who is facing criminal charges, up to $2,500 to impersonate them and take their tests.
The fact that those students were willing to pay so much for exceptional scores is alarming. Why did they feel the need to go to such lengths?
“As tests have become higher-stakes tests, as the competition between kids for scholarships and college entrance has increased, the likelihood of kids looking for ways to beat the system — to cheat — has increased,” Henry Grishman, superintendent of Jericho Public Schools on Long Island, told The New York Times.
This pressure to succeed is incredibly alarming, and this Long Island incident could (or probably already did) occur in other places around the country.
Retrospectively, how much did your SAT score reflect where you are now? The test won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, but perhaps we as a country need to reevaluate the importance of college entrance exams and the measures used to determine whether or not one gets into the school of his or her dreams.
While they may be deemed necessary, are they really worth the fear and stress?
Reach Ashley at alhaines@asu.edu
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