I'm the beginning of my junior year and this seems like a fitting time to start thinking about all the tests I'm going to have to take this year. The PSATS, SATs SAT2s, and ACTs are all on my schedule, and I've recently begun devoting 2.5 hours of my sunday mornings to a test prep course. In the past few years there has been a lot of controversy on whether or not standardized tests are an effective way to judge students. Click here for an article on the unfairness of standardized testing. My problem is that there are some high school students that would rather have a heavy emphasis placed on tests rather than grades or extracurricular activites. Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of things after school and my grades are alright, but my strongest area is my standardized test scores. Is arguing that standardized tests are unfairly catagorizing students based on a number punishing the kids who are great standardized test takers?
The idea of judging someone based on a single area of information also relates to what we've been talking about in class, the book "Into the Wild." I think a lot of my classmates got the impression that Chris McCandless was a really cool guy, and explorer, a brave adventurer. Is it possible that we are only making judgements on select information that Krakauer wanted us to see? We know from the book that John Krakauer saw a lot of himself in Chris McCandless. Maybe Krakauer was purposely giving us a good impression of McCandless to in a way protect his own reputation. Is it possible that with more research from unbiased sources we would have different opinions?
No comments:
Post a Comment