They Are What Try To Define You

Standardized tests. They are what helps you but they are what also try to define you. Students in high school, and not just high school but middle and elementary school too, are taking these standardized tests every year in each subject just to pass their grade and class. They even help you get into college, only if you have the good grade they are looking for. But every year these students take a test on a subject so that the score can define them for the rest of their educational and maybe social lives.

It's true, standardized test do help a student in many ways like getting into college and being able to pass their grade level and move up with the rest of their classmates without staying behind. But the reason for an education system is to learn. It is to learn, not memorize. It is to learn and not learn just the bare minimum of what needs to be known to pass a test. The reason for education is to gain knowledge. How are students supposed to gain knowledge and learn but not to memorize and learn the bare minimum when standardized tests are what America's education systems are based upon.

Getting into college is what a student's goal is once getting into high school. It is what almost everyone is working towards. But in order to get into college a students needs to take a series of standardized tests (SAT, ACT, SOL etc.) so in order to prove something of themselves. It can define their literate level and what college their scores will allow them to get into. But when on these standardized test a student gets a bad score, it makes the students feel like they are worth nothing. All because a paper said that they have failed.

There are many smart people in this world, many with brilliant minds and talents that are being categorized by these standardized test into two. The intelligent and the non-intelligent . Why is it that a person who has talent and is smart but be categorized as a failure if he or she has failed a test? Why is it that a piece of paper should define a person into a single category. It is like saying that everything is black and white when it is not true. Nothing is ever just black and white. there are shades upon shades of grey.