Having just taken the ACT, I am anxiously awaiting my score and hoping that I didn’t completely flub. After all, every adult figure in my life has made it clear that I have no hope of ever achieving anything for the rest of my life if I don’t get into a good college and I can’t get into a good college unless I have a perfect GPA and a high ACT score.

Just like the tactics employed on middle schoolers to create a healthy fear of secondary education, it would appear that the hype surrounding the ACT and SAT are similar to the stories we heard in the eighth grade about the horror of finals and how important MLA formatting is. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the threats we heard about note taking before entering junior high, and it is just like the tales we heard when we were very young and used paper with massive lines to practice the cursive our teachers swore would be required as we moved along our educational and academic careers.

As most of us know, finals can be stressful, but they are not the end of the world. MLA is nice and I like to use it for aesthetic’s sake, but Mr. Timmons doesn’t turn down my paper when I hand in a MLA citation thats a little off even though Mrs. Ballard promised I would fail every paper I didn’t use perfect MLA on. My handwriting is pretty good, but I certainly don’t use cursive, and if I did it would be more likely that my work be turned down rather than applauded due to issues with legibility. In this same way, the ACT and SAT are important in measuring a degree of success, but can’t accurately gage the intelligence and creativity of a student. It’s important to prepare for these test because they open up opportunities for future education, but in the grand scheme of things are not as significant as I had initially considered them to be as I entered our school and sat down and failed to complete my math ACT in the allotted time.

The SAT has been around so much longer than the ACT that information concerning its history and ultimate legitimacy is more easily accessible. The SAT started as a test in the U.S. military that’s sole purpose was to determine who would be a more intelligent leader and who was better at taking tests. The original test was written Carl Brigham who was an esteemed Eugenicist and a large group of eugenics was based on the results of the Army I.Q. test and which would become known as the slightly more difficult and more largely distributed SAT in 1926. Many years later, Harvard was the first school that required an SAT score from applicants, and this was a rule that was established so that anyone of any race and culture could attend the school. The thinking on the matter was that anyone who could pass the SAT with a respectable score deserved to attend a prestigious school. The difficult relationship between testing to increase diversity and the SAT is that anyone can do well on the SAT and it afforded more people more opportunities to make it inside the desirable half of the exclusivity rate, but the SAT was designed by someone who believed there was scientific evidence that proved a genetic distinction between white people and literally every other race in the world, and he wrote the SAT to prove that caucasians were more intelligent than mongoloids and people of mediterranean descent.

Just like every other standardised test, it is difficult to truly prepare students to take them, and they can’t accurately measure every facet of intelligence and academic success which is already widely accepted, but the issue that comes with the SAT and the ACT which was developed as a direct competitor in 1959, is that the SAT and ACT’s results compare directly to factors like race, gender, and class. It may very well be that the original test was aimed to prove that white middle class American men were the best that this is the case. When female students tend to achieve better grades throughout primary and secondary school, but tend to get worse grades on the ACT and SAT, there might be an issue with it’s design. When rich students tend to get better scores on these same tests despite no significant correlation in everyday grades, the basic structure of the test may need to be reconsidered.

With a large overhaul coming in 2016 for the ACT and an increasing number of colleges that have an ACT/SAT free application process that measures intellect and success in a completely different manner than standardized testing, it is good that these issues are acknowledged and slowly being dealt with. For now, however, the ease in which these tests can be administered and the ease in which they can be graded makes it difficult to find an alternative that grades the same factors, even if it is a clearly biassed test that can’t measure whether or not you are a creative writer or a great painter. Just because the ACT is a great way to grade hundreds of people at the same time based on the same factors, doesn’t mean it can truly test someone’s worth like a lot of teachers make it out to.

In the end it’s always nice to get a 28 on the ACT when you only got a 9 on the PLAN. It’s nice that Mr. Timmons will take your essay that’s in size 11 arial font and not times new roman 12, and it is nice that you can use regular handwriting instead of cursive, but it’s always important to remember that your ACT score is not a measure of your worth in life and the opportunities that you deserve to presented. It’s just another test.