more of a heated topic when the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2002. Thousands of parents, teachers, and principals deliberate the costs and benefits of testing high school juniors and seniors in Math, Writing and Critical Reading and how the testing would affect a student’s life. While the majority of colleges and universities require SAT scores from applying freshmen, the SATs are shown to be a waste of time, education, and training. The standardized tests are a burden to everybody and do nothing to show the “brilliance” of American education.
Finland was the top country between 2001 and 2008 despite their absence of SAT testing. Instead of standardized tests, as two Stanford University researchers have discovered, Finnish students achieve success simply by being “active learners who can find, analyze, and use information to solve problems in novel situations” and shows the damage the SATs has done to the U.S. students in comparison to foreign children. However, Finland toppled down the PISA rankings due to a slight change in China’s educational system. The world’s most populated country pushed Finland aside in educational rankings because of their excellence in student preparation for SATs. Once modeled after the U.S. educational system, China decided to drop the “drill n’ kill” test prep to achieve student creativity that most countries fail to add into testings and shows how other countries are succeeding in giving the education the United States is failing to give to their children. Compared to other educational countries, the United States is starting to stray from the slogan of “the greatest country in the world” when Finland and China appear to present their schools with better education.
In addition to foreign rankings, SATs hurt students taking the exams rather than help them. Although only a limited number of higher educational schools do not require SAT scores in student applications, those colleges do not realize that students who want to enroll into those particular schools do not feel the same about acceptance as a college requiring SAT scores. One of the most harmful effects SATs can have on students is the formation of stress in early life. As stress has been linked to heart issues, digestive problems, and bipolar behaviors, several students end up feeling so stressed that the SATs can “produce gripping anxiety in even the brightest students, and make young children vomit or cry, or both,” according to education researcher Gregory J. Cizek, and physical stress truly states how negatively impacting it is to prepare for a national exam. This negative effect on children can be prevented, but even the horrific ideal of childhood stress can hurt several childhoods. The NCLB program primarily targets third graders, but several schools will begin testing earlier to prepare younger students for advanced exams instead of playtime and recess. Not only is this adding more ordeal to elementary education, but even the Gesell Institute of Human Development shows that “children feel like failures now as early as PreK,” leading to unhappy childhoods and fearful dreams of their grades and life education. Most school sympathize with their suffering children, but end up taking dramatic actions that impact the school, state, and students. Schools are so anxious to perform well according the the NCLB’s standards by “gaming the system.” Arizona State University published a finding that schools were encouraging low-testing students to avoid test days and state education boards try to alter exam content or scoring, which is just a waste of time for a useless exam that proves how states suffer under the SATs and can lead to humiliation for low-scoring students. Childhood stress, early test preparation with less playtime, and picking out poor-scoring students is additional fuel to illustrate how the SATs can destroy a child’s early life all due to a junior and senior-level exam to take in almost ten years.