SAT isn’t fair for everyone | The Buc Stops Here | February

Published 1:51 pm Friday, January 28, 2011

The SAT is a test nearly every high school student has to take before they go off to college. This test is supposed to test a student on their readiness to take the next step in life.

It tests your reading, writing and math skills that all students should have learned though out their school years. Some believe that this is not an effective way to test a student.

“Tests are necessary, they are a way to judge a student if you don’t know them,” Kingston High history teacher Kimberly Smith said. “Some kids don’t have the same resources as other kids do. But are these kids any smarter? No. Colleges should take a good look at this test because the playing field is not equal for all those students who don’t have the same recourses.”

A high school student can be doing very well in school by getting great grades but then could have done not so well on their SAT exam. Not all students are meant to take this exam, but I have heard that this test was supposed to tell me if I was smart enough to take the next step in my life. Is it really telling me this or is it telling how well I can fill in circles in a short amount of time?

Shouldn’t there be other ways to assess the students of our generation? There are students who work with their hand to build a house, students who use a pencil and paper to create a new idea with math or science.

There are thousands of different ways we all learn and there are things one student is better at then another but one is not smarter than the other. That’s why we have different jobs, such as artists, construction workers, scientists, teachers and many other things we can become in the future.

The SATs assess our basic knowledge and we should know how to do these things but there should be other ways to see what a student does and does not know. We are not all great at filling in circles; some of us were not very good at coloring in the lines when we were younger.

Melissa Castle is a senior at Kingston High School.