For years, millions of college-bound students have been taking the SATs. That long, strenuous test which supposedly determines your potential and plays a huge role in deciding what colleges you can attend. But is this fair? What if you are a bad test taker but an excellent student? Isn’t there another way of determining a student’s potential? What about grades, do they count? These are some of the questions that come up when talking about the SATs.

Picture this: an "A" student, who is a horrible test taker, spends hours, days and even weeks studying for his SAT test and attending prep courses that "guarantee improvement" but still he gets a poor grade. Yet a "D" student, who has spent very little time studying and has put very little effort into the rest of high school, somehow, does exceptionally well. The diligent, hardworking "A" student would end up losing his or her chance of attending the college that he or she has been working so hard to attend. Meanwhile, the "D" student may have his or her choice of whatever college he or she wants even though he or she hasn’t really earned it. Now this is great for the "D" student but a complete waste and disappointment for the other student who has been working extremely hard throughout high school. If the students had been judged only by their grades, the outcome would be the opposite. 

Some say that the SATs are necessary because high schools across the country have different curriculums and we need some standardized test to make sure all the students know "the essentials." It is true that curriculums vary, but wouldn’t be better to have a standardized curriculum instead of a standardized test? 

This is also an issue for colleges because their difficulty levels vary as well. Every college is completely different and therefore needs different ways of determining who is eligible to attend. An example of a college that is using their own system is St. John’s University. Instead of making students take the SATs, they make them write essays. This college is setting an excellent example for other universities. 

Of course the ideal thing for colleges to do is to interview all their candidates. This is possible but would require a huge amount of effort and enormous amount of money. Interviewing each and every student would require colleges to hire enough people to conduct all of the interviews. The SATs are just an easy way for colleges to get around this "inconvenience." Wouldn’t it make sense that since people pay to go to college that the colleges spend that money and devote that time to interviewing each of the applicants? 

Another problem with the SATs is how extremely Americanized they are. This is a problem because some of the students who want to go to an American college have only been in the country a short time and some have never even set foot here at all. A superb student from another country, hoping to go to college here in the United States, may be bombarded with questions they are not familiar with.

Critics of the SATs say that the test is racially and culturally biased. This is evident through the style of questions and the language used to word the questions. If the United States is made up of so many different cultures and races, nothing should be designed only to cater to the needs of a certain group; this includes college entrance exams.

The SATs should be abolished. Poor test takers and foreign students would be punished unnecessarily by not being accepted into a college they have been working so hard to get into. The SATs don’t really test one’s knowledge but rather test taking skills. In fact, the test used to be called the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Later it was changed to the Scholastic Assessment Test, and now it is just called the SAT. Even test makers are not sure what it is and they make it!