Studen Student Stress Research

Throughout high school and college we will go through a vast amount of testing but why? Testing is used to show a person’s amount of knowledge on a particular subject. Usually it’s for one specific subject and not a majority of them, the standardized tests include all testable subjects as in English, math, science, writing, and reading. However, before we can all begin our college careers we have to take one of two tests, the ACT or the SAT. These two tests determine the college you get into, the amount of scholarships you will receive, and even whether or not your will be accepted into any college.

Anyone who has ever taken the ACT or the SAT knows how stressful and difficult the tests are. Students are forever judged because of the scores the receive by colleges and peers. The ACT/SAT are standardized tests that are meant to calculate what students have learned in previous years of high school. Colleges then use this score to determine whether a student will succeed in college. Specific problems with this process include the fact that high schoolers are extremely busy and may have other things on their minds, the tests require brutal test prep, the test can cause stress and anxiety, and the tests do not accurately gage a student’s college success. For these main reasons, students should not be required to take the ACT/SAT to get into college.

These tests tend to cause the student’s too much stress and puts pressure on them to obtain a certain score on these test that are required on a yearly basis. Teachers also set aside too much time to teach strategies for taking the test and lecturing on how to eliminate some choices. According to Kathy Frandle this is “A huge waste of instruction time” (Fridy). Furthermore, the unneeded stress generally leads to a state of anxiety and it is “setting too many of them up for devastating failure and, consequently, lowered self esteem (Perrone).

Throughout high school and college we will go through a vast amount of testing but why? Testing is used to show a person’s amount of knowledge on a particular subject. Usually it’s for one specific subject and not a majority of them, standardized tests administered in schools today include all testable subjects as in English, Math, Science, Writing, and Reading. However, before we can all take the next step and begin our college careers, we have to take one of two tests, the ACT or the SAT. These two exams demine the college you get into, the amount of scholarships you will receive, and even whether or not your will be accepted into said college, all determined by the score you receive.

According to education researcher Gregory J. Cizek, these tests are not helping the child. They’re hurting them. He knows that teacher need to show off what their students know, but he just doesn't understand why we have to do these tests. He can tell by his work that more than half of kids have an anxiety toward testing. The student may know a lot, but will freeze during the test. “Standardized testing can create a lot of stress for both educators and students. Excellent teachers quit the profession every day because of how much stress is on them. Students especially feel the pressure when there is something meaningful tied to them. In Oklahoma, high school students must pass four standardized tests in various areas, or they do not earn a diploma, even if their GPA was a 4.00. The stress this can cause on a teenager is not healthy in any way,” he states. His plan is to show people that this is a wrong thing to do and is unhealthy for both educators and the

Even though I have worked with high school and college age youth for the past 20 years, I have very little experience with the SAT and ACT. This may, in part, be due to the group of youth I have worked with, foster youth. There are many bright, driven and successful foster youth, but unfortunately, many of them have also had such an inconsistent high school experience that they aren’t even thinking about taking college entrance exams; they are just trying to make sure (hoping) they complete all the credits they need to graduate. Many of their lives are complicated by issues outside of school that interfere with making college plans. I applaud the test administrators for trying to make the tests available to all students and their encouragement of all students taking the exam, but some of the most vulnerable students are

Alarming is an understatement when it comes to the anxiety and stress standardized testing brings. Students are told how vital these tests can be to college acceptance, class placement, and school ranking, so it is no surprise that they lead students to become stressed out and anxious about taking the assessments. According to education researcher Gregory J. Cizek, "illustrating how testing... produces gripping anxiety in even the brightest students, and makes young children vomit or cry, or both" (2). The affect standardized testing has on students is unacceptable, no students should be anxious and uneasy about going to school due to a test. To continue, the Sacramento Bee reported that "test-related jitters, especially among young students,

Students are stressed. But, what is the goal of these tests? Are we trying to make students compete with one another to see who gets the higher score? Or are we preparing them for life outside of school? Maybe at one time these tests were used to measure how well the future leaders of our countries were learning, but now it is no longer like that. These tests seem to show no post-school value except to find the most successful kids and give them scholarships to college. Going along with this, everyone, depending on their grade, is required to take the same exact test. Despite their different ways of thinking, students are grouped together and the ones who are different are “wrong” simply because they were unable to learn it due to the way they were taught. Holding every single student to the same standards avoids the fact that everyone has a different mindset and each person may excel in different subjects. This poses a question: when will the system change? Students are held to such enormous pressure that when they meet the standards, they are convinced they’re stupid, and I struggle with this, too. However, it would be easier if all of the intimidation encountered when we are testing would just be withdrawn and students can be able to take a test, try their best, and if they don’t succeed, they can continue to work hard because, after all, a test shouldn’t determine how

The idea of not using a person ACT or SAT scores to ensure admission is a great idea. Most students want to get into a college of their dream unless they do well on their ACT or SAT. Some are really good test takers and some just fall under pressure. I think having a lot of pressure on your mind taking a test could push you to want to do better on your test and could also cause failure. It could go both ways. According to Hampshire weighed factors, standardized test do not predict a student's’ success in college. I strongly agree with this because I once had an older friend in the same position and He never got into the college he wanted because of his ACT or SAT. Later, He chose a different college and he did fairly well in all his classes

Everyone knows the importance that tests like the ACT and SAT play for students who are trying to get into their dream school. The preparations for these tests are not easy. From personal experience, these said tests were stressful, time consuming and hard to study for. Balancing time for things like school work and a job were hard enough as it was, so finding the time to study for the ACT was basically impossible. To top it off, I did not have the money to afford such study classes and materials for the test. I found it extremely discriminating. After doing some research, I found that I was not the only one who found these standardized tests to be bias and unfair towards specific groups of students. Due to such unequal treatment, I believe

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

4. Roommate conflict is almost the first one that comes as starting life on campus. College students are forced to live with people who may have different values, beliefs, schedules, and habits than they do. There’s nothing worse than having to sleep in the same room as someone you’d normally hate or never talk to.

Let’s now focus specifically on what these dreaded tests value: rapid cognition. Malcolm Gladwell points out something many people don’t realize, “Snap judgements and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door” (Blink 51). In other words, Gladwell says you don’t know why your body tells you to do something or not to do something because those decisions are made “behind a locked door.” The ACT and SAT force their contenders to make numerous, rapid decisions because of their time constraint, which increases the amount of silly mistakes students could avoid if the tests allotted more time. Further, what the tests value frustrates many students because they deny the importance of practical intelligence, something psychologist Robert Sternberg defines as “the particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section” (Gladwell Outliers 101). Tying this into the pop culture aspect, how do you think unknown people suddenly become celebrities? Although most attain popularity from sheer talent, lots of them possess this practical intelligence,

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.

Based on these findings from research done previously I feel that this study is important. Firstly, we need to understand what causes the stressors and how it affects the individual. For example, if you have an entire university with stressed students, not being productive, not performing well academically perhaps thinking of dropping out of university because of the overwhelming anxiety; it can be detrimental to the institution in terms of status and students in terms of individual realisation. Secondly, we soon have to formulate effective and efficient stress management guidelines as we