The abhorrent perversity known as standardized testing wizens many and enraptures none.  Proving you know big fancy words by coloring in bubbles while sitting in a desk for four hours is not an effective way for you to prove your intelligence.

The SAT and ACT are not accurate representations of a person’s intelligence and should not be such an integral part of applying for college. In the real world, ACT tests are not applicable to jobs. People prepare presentations, manage employees, and communicate with other people, along with many other skills, at work.  These abilities are not represented by choosing A, B, C, or D with a Number Two pencil in 35 minutes.

Colleges should focus on grades, not standardized tests, because grades are a more accurate representation of a student’s educational career. Grades are based on time management, meeting deadlines, and, of course, completing the work.  These are all skills that can be applied to real life and show a more accurate representation of the type of student applying to a school.

The public school system does not even focus on the test-taking skills necessary for excelling on standardized tests, which mean sometimes teenagers have to learn these skills on their own.  This requires extra time and money, which are both hard to come by.

“The big thing is teaching reading strategies,” Danette Hughes, ACT tutor and English teacher at Wauconda High School, said. “It’s very different from what they teach in high school because you don’t have to read the whole passage. You have to understand what to read… and the science section is not actually a science test. It’s a reading test. Because any student in the country can take the ACT and the kids are in all different types of science, they can’t pinpoint exactly what science classes these kids have been in.”

Colleges want to know how intelligent prospective students are, but tests like the SAT and ACT measure only two out of seven theoretical types of intelligence, according to Howard Gardner, author of Frames of Mind. Standardized tests focus on linguistic (critical reading) and logical (math) intelligence, completely ignoring physical, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and spatial intelligence.  Since colleges are looking for the complete package in a student, they should want to see all angles of a student’s intelligence and base scholarships on merit.

“I’d say the average person takes it at least three or four times,” Hughes said. “I mean, the more times you take it, you have a better chance of improving your score or maybe getting scholarship money or to get into the better college that you want to. I just tutored a senior who needs to get two more points so she can get an extra $10,000 a year.”

According to Hughes, some students prepare for the ACT all summer.  Colleges should want to see an accumulation of knowledge over the course of one’s school years, like grades, not what a brain can cram in a matter of months and regurgitate in four hours.  Standardized tests are fine when it comes to reading graphs about sea life, but are almost useless when it comes to the skills teenagers need for the rest of their lives.