Each year, Concord Academy administers the SAT, PSAT, and several AP exams. All of these tests are standardized, meaning they are supposed to serve as a reliable comparison between students all over the country. However, these tests are not actually a fair measurement of a student’s knowledge, and should not be used to assess someone’s academic abilities.

One of the biggest problems with standardized testing is that it favors those of higher socio-economic statuses. In the case of the SAT, there are huge disparities between test takers of different races, ethnicities, and gender identities. In fact, the SAT was created by Carl Brigham, an American eugenicist, who believed white people were inherently smarter than people of color. This effectively makes tests like the SAT a measure of a student’s socio-economic background. Accordingly, a study conducted by Harvard in 2023 showed that students in the top one percent of wealthiest Americans were 13 times more likely to score a 1300 or higher on the SAT than students from low-income families.

Additionally, standardized tests like the SAT do not actually measure if someone will thrive in a college environment. Whether someone gets a ‘good score’ on SAT or not does not determine if they are able to collaborate with their peers, advocate for themselves, or manage their time effectively. This is best summed up in an analogy I first heard from the podcast What Colleges Want: standardized tests are like free throw shooting. Sure, they are a part of the basketball game, but whether a player is a good free throw shooter or not says almost nothing about how good of a basketball player they are.

The SAT is not administered in an environment similar to the one students would be in at college. During the test, they cannot ask questions, talk through their ideas with their peers, nor problem-solve in a group. More important than actually knowing the answer to a question is having the ability to figure that question out using the available resources. Standardized tests pull students away from what is most important: being able to succeed in the real world. Outside of standardized testing, students will have to work in groups, ask questions, and know when to take breaks. Instead of preparing students for this reality, standardized tests are teaching them to study to perform well on one exam that will only take up a few hours of their lives.

However, I do understand that the SAT aims to provide a metric by which to compare students at different schools, as a grade-point average system at one school might work differently than another. While in theory the standardized metric provided by the SAT is a good idea, I do not think there is a way to execute it without the testing environment being unfair. Students of a higher socio-economic status can get private tutors and have access to schools with more funding that, in turn, will better prepare them to take standardized tests. Furthermore, I do not see a way for a test to be designed that measures more than just a student's ‘free throw.’ Some students perform better on tests than others, but that does not necessarily correlate with their performance in an academic environment.

What I value most in my learning is being able to practice effective communication over and over again: asking my teachers questions, giving a presentation in class, working on a math problem with my table group. Standardized testing does not even take communication skills into account; it is only about what students know, not what they can find out. Additionally, these exams inherently favor students with higher socio-economic statuses, so while standardized testing aims to compare students from different schools using the same grading scale, the comparison will never truly be fair. There will always be something crucial to a student’s academic ability that the test does not account for.