Opinion

Bubble tests revisited

Breaking down an archaic form of assessment

By Marshall Dury

Posted on Dec. 04, 2003, at 12:00 a.m.

I thought I had freed myself from the bondage of antiquated testing forms in high school. I fretted over the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and to be honest, I had a purely average performance. It may also be noted that I had a proud scholastic record in high school. But I am not writing this to take a trip down Nostalgic Avenue. The impurity I thought I had purged from myself not four years ago has returned: the beast of standardized testing.

The Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) are looming over me. They are just sitting in the back of my mind waiting to massacre my confidence, destroy my pride and reposition what I have learned in the past four years here. While they are amazingly similar to the SAT, I will not resign to the fact that I just have to take them and move on. On the other hand, I can’t refuse to take these bad boys – they’re an integral part of my application process for graduate school.

The truth is that standardized testing is false when it comes to assessing a person’s work style or ambitious undertakings in school. I am not, how do you say, mentally gifted. I was not born with an innate ability to solve math problems or absorb reading comprehension through osmosis. I am going to take a test that will assess the exact opposite way that I work. In reality, the only reason I have a transcript I’m not ashamed to send away to colleges is because I have work my ass off.

I’m not here to try and convince you why I’m above the GRE – not my point at all. Rather, I think we’re all above standardized testing as a whole. The convention it is working off of is greatly flawed. For students who bust their humps to do their work and scoot by with an ‘A,’ standardized testing is a constant reminder that they fall short of social norms. On the other hand, another student may be comfortably living with C’s and D’s in all his classes, while scoring somewhere in the brilliant realm on these types of tests.

I am fighting this monolithic battle for both students: for the ones who deserve to shed this burden and the ones who are reminded of their lack of personal conviction in schoolwork. In reality, schools shouldn’t place any emphasis on standardized tests. God forbid an admissions department actually read those applications we slave over for hours. I see the standardized tests as a comfortable fallback for schools – like a bar of admission standard that moves at the will of whoever feels like letting you in. If we were all admitted to universities based on our actual scholastic accomplishments and personal extracurricular endeavors then a school would have a real snapshot of who we are, what we can bring to a school and whether or not we are “average.”

I was tired of it four years ago and I’m still tired of it. I truly do not believe that standardized tests have to be a necessary evil in life. If someone with a sense of logic and some personal conviction – get the irony – would address the problem with this form of testing student “aptitude” or “comprehensive knowledge/understanding/problem solving,” most of us could sleep just a little better.

If you can’t tell, I am jaded. I want all universities – including the University of Maine – to hear me loud and clear: standardized testing judges nothing but the students’ ability to stay focused for longer than two hours at a time and how well they can “stay inside the lines” on those frightening bubbles.

I may be the minority in believing that the GRE will be a waste of my time and all other admissions officials’ time. However, something tells me one day someone will stumble upon this deeply rooted trend, exposing it for the horrible reality that it truly is.

Marshall Dury is a bitter senior English major.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2003, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.