This is an opinion article piece.  Ava Flores is a junior at Mendham who writes for Sports. All opinions expressed in the following editorial are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Patriot. 

As a junior, I’ve been narrowing down colleges and the subject of test optional colleges weighs heavy on my mind. The California UC system has announced that they would not be requiring SAT and ACT scores for the next five years and possibly indefinitely. This has me thinking, should standardized testing be eliminated for college entrance?  I believe standardized testing should not be part of the college admissions process.

Firstly, standardized testing is an unreliable measure of student achievement. The best student in each class can have a 4.0 GPA and above but be the worst at test taking. For instance, first lady Michelle Obama, who attended Princeton University, said she has struggled with standardized tests. Michelle Obama was still able to be accepted into a prestigious ivy league school such as Princeton despite her test scores. Colleges are not only looking for the scores and GPA of students but who they are and what they want for their future. The qualities that colleges want to see in a student include leadership, initiative, and a willingness to take risks. Judging an individual based on only their test scores is not a complete profile of that person because there are many forms of intelligence.

The constraints of standardized tests puts teachers in a precarious position of teaching test material instead of developing independent thinkers. Meredith Kolodner from the Daily News states, “Schools that don’t show improvement on the tests could be shut, and teacher tenure decisions are now directly linked to student performance on the exams.Last year, pass rates on the reading exam dropped to 42% from 69% the previous year and to 54% from 82% in math.The city has already decided to close a record 27 schools this year because of poor performance. It may also soon release teacher ratings based on student test performance to the public. Many students took test prep packets home over the spring break.” Not only are the students under tremendous pressure to succeed on standardized tests but also the teachers are heavily relying on the students to perform well. Test preparation should not be on an everyday schedule for the students. Learning should not be taken away from the students due to the lack of understanding. In order to understand the standardized tests you must learn the material that comes with the math, english, and science sections. Understanding should never be rushed and when it is that is when the students will have difficulty processing the information. No student is alike. What I mean by this is that everyone’s learning thought process is different. By not showing different ways of learning the material to benefit everyone in the class each student is at risk of failure. 

When taking any standardized tests you want to achieve the best score possible. However, can we rely on who is grading our tests? The billion dollar testing industry is notorious for making time costly and time consuming scoring errors. In the years of 2005 and 2006 many mistakes were made. According to Reporter Valerie Strauss from the Washington Post, “SAT college admissions test- 4,400 tests wrongly scored; $3 million settlement after lawsuit.” It was also recorded that in the year 2015 in Minnesota Pearson paid $5.7 million in fines and for services for testing foul ups. As a high school student I care a tremendous amount for grades and SAT and ACT scores. If my chances were ruined getting into college because of companies making correcting errors it would be very disappointing. 

To conclude, the positives of standardized tests could benefit the student but the cons of standardized testing outweigh every positive. It’s an unreliable measure of what a student can achieve, the constraints of standardized tests puts teachers in a precarious position of teaching test material instead of developing independent thinkers, and the billion dollar testing industry is notorious for making time costly and time consuming scoring errors. By eliminating the standardized tests we can set up every student for success for their future. We can teach the students on education that really matters without the burden of taking a test in order to get into the school you want. Standardized tests as a college entrance metric does not comprehensively assess achievement and is prone to be inaccurate. Therefore, it should be discontinued.