Column by J1 Reporter Danielle Carrol

You wake up to the sound of your alarm blaring at you in the early morning, eat a healthy breakfast, grab your number two pencils and a calculator. On your ride there, you dread the aura of the testing room. If you haven’t picked up yet, I’m talking about the standardized tests-the bane of my existence.

For people like me who aren’t Einsteins, standardized tests equal frustration. You are told everything on the test is what you’ve learned over the course of your school years and that there’s nothing to worry about. But at some point during the test, your mind is sure to draw a blank and although you’re told that you won’t get penalized for a wrong answer, however, the amount of time you spend on the tricky questions could cost you.

The speed reading, glancing back and forth between pages, frantically making sure your answers are shaded dark enough, and the good ole time crunch ultimately comes to an end. You just wasted three hours of your day and now wait for your results for what seems like an eternity.

Eventually, you get your results, and you’re not too satisfied with your score. You beat yourself up and tell yourself that you could have done better. You most likely compare your score with your friends and if they did better, you start to question your academic abilities.

For some students, this could be the reality. Although you’re aware that a 3-hour test does not determine your academic abilities, several colleges require you to submit your test scores, and the higher the score, the better chances you have of getting into a prestigious college if you are a dreamer.

Standardized tests hold every student to the same standard, which is unrealistic, and there are many test companies out there taking advantage of students who can’t reach a good benchmark score. 

To start off, to take the ACT or SAT costs anywhere between $50 to $70, and you could easily spend $1,800 for tutoring alone. At the end of the day, standardized tests aren’t about a way to properly reflect a student’s ability, it’s just another money-making venture