By Sabby
Over the past couple months only a few words seem to be coming out of my parents mouths—have you done your SAT work? Every time I hear these words, something is set off inside of me, an angry fire that in under a second seems to melt any signs of me being in a good mood that day. My response to this question is almost always the same- Mom, Dad; can you just stop bugging me?! Aka, no, I have not studied today. At all. But it isn’t like I don’t want to study; it’s just that the pressure is really getting to me, and that’s freaking me out. I blame my relatively mini crisis 50% on myself, 50% on my parents, and 100% on today’s school system.
I know that everybody has to take hard tests in their lives, but I also have recently realized that today, the SAT is not really relevant or necessary anymore. It does not test you on your comprehension skills or about anything that you have learned in school.
Driving to school this Wednesday as I listened to an article on NPR, relief washed over me. The article was about the standardized testing that you need to take to get into college, and confirmed my suspicions of the SAT’s irrelevancy. I was shocked to learn that it was originally used to test the IQ of army recruits during the 1920’s. Now it’s being used to test high school students? To me, it seemed ridiculous, and I let out a shriek of laughter at how silly that sounded. But for some reason, nobody else in my family listening to the report seemed to think that this was odd.
For some kids, it’s easy to master the strategies for taking the sat. For others like me, it really is not that easy. Junior year is hard enough, and I never have time to study. With AP classes, extra curriculars, reviving my rapidly diminishing social life and getting my parents off of my back, life is definitely more stressful. All I can think about is if all of this is worth the effort, and whether the SAT will really be “determining what happens in the rest of my life” like every adult keeps reminding me. I certainly hope not, as I desperately want to believe that colleges think of us as more than one score.