Every juniors’ spring can be summed up by one, terrible, awful word: stress. SATs, ACTs, regular school work, sports, extracurricular activities, and everything else juniors have to do can cause students to break down under the pressure. But one thing that has been bothering me the most through this “pre- college” process is the unfairness of standardized testing. In the past decade, such a large majority of students take SAT and ACT tutoring that it is almost shocking to hear that a student is not receiving help for the tests. What is even more ridiculous is the cost of these classes or tutoring sessions. The Princeton Review tutoring classes cost around $1,000 total, while most individual tutoring sessions can cost well over $100 per session. Some students may not be fortunate as others and can’t take tutoring, automatically putting them at a disadvantage.
Since I am in the midst of the whole junior stress stage and I am currently in SAT tutoring, I can’t say that it isn’t helpful. The amount of pressure on students to get into a college eliminates the worry of any price tag; parents’ thoughts are “If it gets my kid into the school of his/her dreams, I’ll be willing to pay anything.” The scores of SATs and ACTs demonstrate how much money and time are spent on tutoring, not on the actual intelligence of the student.
In fact, during one of my tutoring meetings, I asked my teacher if the SATs measure a student’s level of intelligence and she straightforwardly answered, “No.”
Alright, so I am basically spending sometimes 10 hours a week to prepare for a test that will have a heavy input on my future, and it doesn’t even accurately measure the capability of my knowledge. The SAT simply measures a student’s ability to take the SAT, nothing else.
Not only do the actual tests for both SATs and ACTs cost about $50, but the tutoring itself is so overpriced. Tests that are meant to help determine where a student will go to college have turned into a competitive business. The college is process is a tedious and overwhelming one, and the way the whole test system revolves around money is extremely corrupt. Standardized tests that will potentially affect the rest of a student’s life have completely lost sense of their actual purpose, which is to measure a student’s intelligence.