Standardized Testing: What It Is and Why Schools Rely On It

The Perfect Score is a Teen Vogue series on standardized testing in the United States.

There comes a point in almost every American high school student's education when you're sitting at a desk in a quiet room, surrounded by your classmates, staring down at a Scantron sheet with your no.2 pencils and your graphing calculator, and asking yourself: "Why am I doing this?"

Standardized testing in U.S. public schools starts at an early age — the first few years of elementary school, in fact. And it continues through high school, building to the ultimate tests, the SAT and the ACT, both of which we're often told from a young age could determine the course of our entire future.

But when you're sitting in a classroom, staring at a multiple-choice reading comprehension question, or an arcane vocabulary word, or a polynomial equation — or maybe you're taking your Advanced Placement (AP) exams, so it's a DBQ essay or verb conjugation challenge — you might wonder, "How did we get here?" How did we decide that this would be the determining factor of the rest of our lives?

When I was in high school, I took the SAT twice, hoping for a more perfect score that would launch me to my dream school. But that’s not all. I also took five AP tests, the PSAT, and at least one SAT II. I took a test to gain admission to the high school I attended after years of taking Virginia SOLs in elementary school. And after all those years of tests, I can barely tell you what I scored on any of them; because once I got to college, no one seemed to care anymore. And they’ve never come up since.

In 2018, more schools than ever seem to be test optional. Colleges like the University of Chicago are no longer requiring students to submit SAT or ACT scores with their applications; and as of this summer, fewer than 25 schools still require the writing portion of the SAT. In June, a group of seven Washington, D.C.-area private schools made the decision to stop offering AP courses altogether over the next four years, citing “diminished utility.”

The role of standardized testing in the American education system is evolving; but to figure out what it can or should be, we first have to understand the history of how we got here, how those scores are actually used, and how testing itself affects students across the country. This week, we’ll attempt to unravel even a small part of that — so that when you pick up a no.2 pencil this weekend, even if you can’t remember what “sporadically” means, you at least won’t be asking yourself why.

Related: The SAT Is a Reinforcement of America’s Social Inequality

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