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College Board Abolished

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The College Board Should Be Abolished The SAT was first administered in 1926, and the acronym originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” However, once critics noted that “success on the test demonstrated an aptitude for doing well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and little else,” the College Board dropped the meaning behind the acronym (Nelson). Now, the “SAT” just means, well, the SAT. Since the beginning of the SAT, The College Board has expanded its role in the standardized testing industry, and now also administers AP Tests and SAT Subject tests. Although some people believe that this “non-profit” organization is helpful to students and their families, The College Board should be abolished because it is corrupt, it does not accomplish …show more content…

The intended purpose of the College Board’s SAT is to show the academic potential of a student to colleges. However, this intent is not fulfilled, and the test favors those of higher income brackets. In fact, “About 30 percent of those who took the SAT were black, Hispanic or American Indian, groups whose scores have stubbornly remained lower than those of whites and Asians.” (The International Herald Tribune). Because those which are typically in lower income brackets have been statistically proven to average lower scores on the SAT, the test does not accomplish its intended purpose. If the test truly showed the academic potential of students to colleges, it would not be discriminatory based on any factors besides those relevant to college admissions, such as intelligence and passion. It is very difficult to effectively showcase a student’s potential with standardized tests, because they “focus only on cognitive dimensions, ignoring many other qualities that are essential to student success” (NCTE). These cognitive dimensions are very limited in scope, and are not effective in portraying all of the skills that a student may have. On the SAT, these focuses are reading, writing, and math. On the ACT, these focuses are english, math, reading, and science. Either way, a very narrow field of subjects is tested (even more narrow on the SAT), and even then, only a small …show more content…

The SAT is seen as a gateway to college. At top tier universities, it gets your foot in the door. According to Goral, “The elite universities that can point to this exam and say that if a student doesn't score X, Y and Z on it, then we're not going to consider them.” Many students believe that these tests are the only obstacle left on the way to their dream colleges, so they study for hours on end, hoping for a great performance on this test. Many of these students even cannot wait once they’ve tested to see their scores. This causes an endless cycle of stress between studying for one test, waiting for scores, and then studying for the next test. Not only are these hard working students stressed because of standardized testing, but their teachers are too. These teachers spend valuable class time drilling the basic fundamentals involved with standardized testing into their students, because they are necessary for success on standardized tests. However, the fundamentals can only help so much on these tests, and the rest of the work is up to the student. Teachers are often then evaluated based on their students’ performances, causing them to be stressed. According to W. James Popham, “the better the job that teachers do in teaching important knowledge and/or skills, the less likely it is that there will be items on a standardized achievement test measuring such knowledge

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