Bailey+M.

=SAT a way to measure aptitude or a business? =

media type="file" key="APUSH.m4a" width="300" height="50" ==== As junior year approach students around America prepare to face their hardest year of high school. Students are plagued with mountains of homework, many hours of community service, extracurricular activities, and standardize tests all in the name of getting into a “good” college. ==== ====Colleges’ pressure students to not only excel in school, service, and secondary activities but also to reign supreme at standardized test. Students are pushed to their mental limits. We are made to believe that the scores we receive on these standardized test will influence what college we attend, or if we will even attend college. These standardized test or the SAT may very well determine our secondary schooling and for what? Nothing, you could have the best GPA in the world and a horrible SAT score and there goes your dream of attending an Ivy League School. ==== ====The SAT is no more than a test designed to trick the average student. It is not a test that measures intelligence rather it is a test that measures how well you “should” do your first year of college. Parents, high schools, and even the College Board stress the importance of paying a couple hundred dollars for a tutor that will teach you the “tricks” of the SAT. We spend every Saturday or Sunday for over two months working with our tutor to try to gain that nearly impossible feat of a 1600 on the test. ==== ====We learn to dread that one or two Saturdays a year that we wake up at 7 o’clock and amble over to take the SAT that will determine our future, and it’s all for nothing. The SAT, while once may have been an accurate test, now has developed into a business that requires tutors to teach you how to excel rather than depending on what you know. If you have done well all four years of high school and you have a superb GPA shouldn’t that be enough? Shouldn’t how well we do in college be determined by how well we do in high school? ==== ====I believe that how hard we work and the grades we receive in high school are more of an indicator about whether we will do well our first year in college than a standardized test (aka the SAT) that is more of a business than an actual test. ====