Charles Horton Cooley's Theory : The Looking-Glass Self

With college admissions relying so highly on these tests many bright and capable students are getting left with little options (Sternberg 7). These students are facing this because the ACT and SAT primary focus on a narrow segment of skills that are needed to become a person that makes significant differences to the world (Sternberg 7). College’s argue that the admission test give them a quick glimpse of what the students potential is because they do not have to time to individually evaluate each potential student. This may be true but we need a better way to distinguish a person’s abilities than just a simple score on a test.

The increase in interest to the problem of communication in sociology actualized questions of understanding the nature of the individual. This determined the weakening of the behaviorist tradition, which is characterized by a nihilistic attitude to the study of psychological processes and the determination of the human life as a manifestation of the externally observable behavior (by analogy with the animal reaction). The interactionist approach in sociology has been formed and it refers to the integrity of the human personality and self-determination in the micro-social environment. In this research paper, I want to consider the interactionist theory, as it perfectly reflects micro-social processes and explain the nature of human identity.

There is a strong irony in our emphasis on standardized testing in a country that promotes diversity among career options for students. Tests are mandated throughout the country and students spend days preparing for the multiple exams they have to complete. Many students pay hundreds of dollars for tutoring and prep materials to improve their scores on these standardized tests. Even school syllabuses have shifted to help prepare for the big standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT.This frenzy behind standardized testing is understandable however, since colleges put a lot of weightage on standardized test scores and the government hands out thousands of dollars of scholarships to both students and schools based on the results of these exams. The Washington Post estimates the market to be a two billion annual business.

Standardized testing has been around since the early 1900’s. Today, it determines a high school student’s future. Every year juniors in high school start to prepare months in advance for the SAT’s and ACT’s. Along with the test itself, comes stress that is not necessary. The debate of standardized tests defining a student’s academic ability or not has become a recent popular controversial topic. Many colleges and universities are starting to have test optional applications because they are realizing that a single test score does not demonstrate the knowledge of a student. There is more value in a student that should rule an acceptance or rejection. In the article, “SAT Scores Help Colleges Make Better Decisions” Capterton states, “The SAT has proven to be valid, fair, and a reliable data tool for college admission” (Capterton). Capterton, president of the College Board, believes that the SAT’s and ACT’s should be used to determine a student’s acceptance because it is an accurate measure. What Capterton and deans of admissions of colleges and universities don’t know is the abundant amount of resources upper class families have for preparation, the creative talents a student has outside of taking tests, and the amount of stress they put on a 17 year old.

A young girl is excited about graduating high school and attending her first year at college. She tries hard at school and receives above-average grades. She is an active student involved in student council, band, the drama team, and peer tutoring, but her ACT scores are extremely low, disqualifying her from many universities. The young girl represents many students who are not successful at taking standardized tests because they have not developed the advanced skills required to take a test like the ACT or SAT. An academically motivated and responsible student should not be prevented from attending college because a "standard" test is not his or her standard. The current methods of testing for the ACT or SAT should be abolished and

Each year high school students from around the country take the SAT or ACT. The ACT and SAT are both standardized test used by colleges to determine the knowledge of a student and predict what their performance will be in their first year of college. An immense amount of pressure is put on student to receive certain scores in order to obtain scholarships and admission into college. Even just one point on a student’s score can determine if they will be accepted into their dream college. However, the results from standardized tests, such as the ACT and SAT, are often inaccurate. Because of this one’s knowledge and academic ability are misrepresented, and they are denied certain opportunities. Standardized tests such as the ACT and the SAT

Einstein once said, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Likewise, if a poor test-taker is judged by their SAT score, they could be forced to attend an inadequate institute of higher education. For decades, the SAT has been “the test” that makes or breaks a student's chances of getting into their top college. Generally, the privileged populace do well, but minorities and women do not come out as strong and are therefore limited to college choice. The SAT has proven to be an unsuitable, biased method for predicting success of students in college.

For many years, standardized tests have been a pillar of college admissions. Students are persuaded to take the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) or the American College Test (ACT) because colleges believe the scores can predict an applicant’s academic success after high school. However, an increasing number of colleges have made reporting test scores optional due to inconsistencies with the tests, many of which have been emphasized by students. These inconsistencies and other problems with test distribution have led to increasing demands for standardized testing to be reformed or become optional in the admissions process. Standardized testing should be eliminated as a criterion for college applicants because the tests have made education less significant, have made scores vary among students with similar academic abilities, and have not contributed a noticeable improvement to children’s intelligence.

By now, everyone has come to the conclusion that SAT is a flawed system. The test is designed to determine the future of high school students. Its job is to capture a snapshot of what a student has learned over the course of their academic career. Unfortunately, this is not what happens. Instead of treating a student’s score as just a snapshot, colleges treat a student’s score as their complete academic intelligence. What the system fails to realize is that not all students are good test takers. A student could study for weeks, but when the curator says “You may begin” their mind goes blank. Furthermore, the education system has become too dependant on the SAT to calculate a student’s intelligence. The real emphasis should be on the student’s GPA, essays, extracurriculars, volunteer work, and how much they challenged themselves. Focusing on these aspects allows the college to review an applicant’s work ethic.

Many students throughout the American education system struggle due to the fact that they have to take a standardized test. But, this struggle differs for each student, some are too lazy to take them while others are having difficulty performing well on these tests. As a student who learned English as a second language, I could relate with the people who are having trouble performing well on standardized tests. When I was in high school there was nothing more frightening than Standardized tests. There was a lot of emphasize on these tests and they had the power to determine my future in the means of deciding which colleges I could attend. But, I wasn’t alone in this matter, not all students perform to their potential on Standardized tests. No matter how hard I tried to study for these tests, I was just not doing as well as my class mates. It made me feel like I was beneath all my other class mates and I thought they were intellectually superior. But, I met other like me who were not good at taking test and didn’t perform well on these

The College Board and ACT nonprofit organizations, known for developing and administering the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and American College Testing (ACT) assessment respectively, represents higher education’s widely accepted college readiness determinant for prospective students. These examinations empirically measure a student’s grasp of reading, writing, and mathematics – subjects taught every day in high school classrooms. As a result, they typically constitute a significant proportion of the total entrance requirements for prospective students to relevant institutions of higher learning and denote a serious endeavor unto itself. Students commonly take one or both of these examinations during their junior or senior year of high school as dictated by an institution’s administrative guidelines, although most colleges now allow either test as part of their proprietary admission formulas. And since it turns out there exists subtle differences in the tests themselves, students should review research concluding certain individuals may be better candidates for maximizing performance on one examination versus another.

Standardized tests give students who are better test takers an advantage over those who are not. An American association known as Posse Scholars gives students who excelled in school the opportunity to retake the SAT if their scores were not expected. “Posse Scholars' combined median reading and math SAT score is only 1,050, while the median combined score at the colleges Posse students attend varies from 1,210 to 1,475. Nevertheless, they succeed. Ninety percent of Posse Scholars graduate -- half of them on the dean's list and a quarter with academic honors” (Rosenberg). Posse has a goal of eliminating the gap between students’ scores on the SAT. They choose students all around America who excel in academics but didn’t score exactly how they wanted to have another chance in conquering the test. This way, gaps in SAT scores will be a reflection of a student’s work in school rather than someone choking up on a

Many aspects of students’ lives dwell on how they do on tests, such as the ACT, SAT, or even their basic grades to be accepted in to college. The tests need to be designed to accurately gather information on the knowledge of the student, the ACT only asks you a hand full of questions on basic subject yet take math for instance there are thousands of areas in math to understand and master. Not only are there more than very specific questions asked the tests do not take in to account the different ways people solve problems such as having to write out question. Some students such as myself cannot do mental math and it takes us longer to understand the question we are being asked to evaluate, yet the ACT is a timed test. This creates a bias in the system that students don’t know math were the real problem could either be test anxiety or a lack of time given to properly complete the test. Testing is deeply rooted in students’ lives, making it an ever more pressing matter to fix the issues that concern us

Saunders (2013) states that the three steps of this theory are: (1) imagining how we portray

What’s your ACT score? Students are branded with their ACT and SAT scores in society. Today’s education is heavily leaning on standardized tests. An average students takes over one hundred standardized tests in his or her school years. Standardized tests are used to measure and test the knowledge of students in a particular subject in a quick and easy way. These tests are also used to see the extend and skill of students for qualifications of certain colleges and scholarships. Some of these standardized tests include the ACT and the SAT. But do these test fully measure the strength of knowledge these students have practiced for their whole lives? Standardized testing does not allow students to fully and completely show their strength in education and instead results in breaking down students mentally and physically.