Paul Agbaje (17)
Scribbles
I sit at a table, pencil in hand, jotting irately with my body in a domain of frenzy—my perception of time and that of the clock bickering. I move with a distinct confidence, remembering my hours of preparation: the different books, the expensive class that I begged my parents to pay for. I can taste the seedless fruits of my fruitless labor.
However, a point arrives where time desists, and the hands grow sweaty, the mouth dry, the fingers tormented to numbness. Exhaustion sets in, and 15 minutes of my SAT’s math section becomes a Wrestlemania of my anxieties: those shifting aggressively like a Rubik's cube, yet possessing layers rougher than the lines of the puzzle. I withdraw from the experience and urge a question: why am I here?
In some way, everyone has had interaction with standardized testing, especially with the increasingly aggressive implementation of standardized tests within schools. During the 2016-2017 school year, over 7.3 million test takers completed an SAT- or PSAT-related assessment, and about 2 million high school graduates took the ACT, indicating the increasing focus that society places on testing.
“Why am I here?”
Firstly, standardized testing, in its most basic form, is beneficial to any admissions procedure. Tests are pragmatic, quantifiable, easily regulated, and they consume relatively short amounts of time. These qualities make testing efficient in evaluating capability over pools of candidates.
Today’s tests, though, have exceeded their basic form. They’ve transmogrified to the status of social phenomena, ruling over the lives of students and possessing jurisdiction to accelerate or halt students’ trajectories. Just Google “SAT” and awe at the 1.2 billion search results teeming with students seeking some wondrous formula to a high score that simply doesn't exist.
Though tests succeed in objectifying the college process, they appear to do the opposite of what the College Board calls “measuring the thinking skills you’ll need to succeed in college and career” in their SAT study guide, as truly high thinking is too elusive for the confines of tests.¹ Similarly, the ACT’s website platitudinously describes its “one purpose” as “helping people achieve education and workplace success.”²
It’s as though we, as a society, offer validity to the conviction that one’s thinking ability exists within a number ranging from 400 to 1600 or 1 to 36. And one may ask, “what if this conviction is true?”
Yes, a 1600, to an extent, reflects a student’s intelligence; however, one misses the passion of a student who has a distinct interest in math, or the willingness of a student who walks hours to school to obtain an education that the rest of their family never got the chance to grasp (both are actual stories of students I met during my SAT class. The irony becomes extremely apparent as colleges often boast regarding students as “more than just a number”).
On one level, maybe testing does do some of what is claimed. Many studies reveal test scores correlate with GPA, which better depicts the totality of a student.
Yet here, in a test given so much importance, is some enough? Human nature consists of attempts to achieve the ideal, and we often accept our inability to reach perfection, yet even in acknowledgement of futility, is some sufficient?
Do I know? No.
But, maybe these are questions we should consider before settling for hours to analyze passages about frighteningly clever animals, or to assess the implications of linear models in a strange boy’s watermelon obsession.
And maybe we consider these questions, yet willfully forget amid the dread of facing our inadequacies.
Lately, I ask these questions when navigating life, distressed from my ambitions wrestling the bounds of my scores. Such are questions that I believe hold the true value of standardized tests, rather than the high scores or the laurels of high scoring students; the test which confines a fraction of the ideals of education is too imperfect for a score to even matter.
So what does matter?
Standardized testing in both its imperfect attempt to encapsulate these ideals of high school education and the impulse that compels retakes retains esteem in reflecting the human need to confront insufficiencies. Standardized testing forces us to tackle that in which we are deficient, in order to improve ourselves (at least our perception) in totality. When one engages a standardized test, they become fastened to their own obsession, meticulously studying their defects to eventually engage in a Darwinian evolution. And those aptly evolved are presented with the highest scores: a true “survival of the fittest.” Except the system is wrong because the “fittest,” in this case, aren’t peak performers, 1600’s, 36’s. The fittest are individuals who apply this forcefulness in confronting their deficiencies to everything that they do. They live with an ambition that extends past the highest scores in ways appearing socially delusional, not necessitating a numerical value.
The clock ticks. The scribbles shriek. I still sit with my anxieties dancing before me like Prospero’s puppets. Though stressed, I begin to find solace in rejecting the test, but suddenly, I shudder at the voice of the proctor. “Five minutes,” she says. I reach for my pencil, straighten my papers, and begin to write like a madman.
1. “2017 Report Overview.” CollegeBoard, 8 Sept. 2017, reports.collegeboard.org/sat-suite-program-results/overview.
Maybe, the “you” refers to the employees of the CollegeBoard, our favorite profitable non-profit, who’ve succeeded in monopolizing facets of secondary education through AP curricula and have profited from condensing the skills necessary to succeed in college and career to the ability to read and comprehend simple algebra. I think most know that “success” commands much more.
2. “Products and Services.” ACT, 8 Sept. 2017, www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services.html.
This is coming from the ACT’s website who recently sent me an email claiming, “about half of students that retest increase their scores.” If true, the company completely acknowledges the test’s incapability to measure the skill it intends. Therefore, the ACT, by its own logic, fails to fulfill its “only purpose” of “helping people achieve education and workplace success.” Yet still, I’m sure that all who have actually achieved “workplace success” attribute everything to the infamous 3 hour “bubbling session.”
Paul Agbaje is vastly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person, and so he chooses not to condense his entire life into a few meager phrases.
Scribbles
I sit at a table, pencil in hand, jotting irately with my body in a domain of frenzy—my perception of time and that of the clock bickering. I move with a distinct confidence, remembering my hours of preparation: the different books, the expensive class that I begged my parents to pay for. I can taste the seedless fruits of my fruitless labor.
However, a point arrives where time desists, and the hands grow sweaty, the mouth dry, the fingers tormented to numbness. Exhaustion sets in, and 15 minutes of my SAT’s math section becomes a Wrestlemania of my anxieties: those shifting aggressively like a Rubik's cube, yet possessing layers rougher than the lines of the puzzle. I withdraw from the experience and urge a question: why am I here?
In some way, everyone has had interaction with standardized testing, especially with the increasingly aggressive implementation of standardized tests within schools. During the 2016-2017 school year, over 7.3 million test takers completed an SAT- or PSAT-related assessment, and about 2 million high school graduates took the ACT, indicating the increasing focus that society places on testing.
“Why am I here?”
Firstly, standardized testing, in its most basic form, is beneficial to any admissions procedure. Tests are pragmatic, quantifiable, easily regulated, and they consume relatively short amounts of time. These qualities make testing efficient in evaluating capability over pools of candidates.
Today’s tests, though, have exceeded their basic form. They’ve transmogrified to the status of social phenomena, ruling over the lives of students and possessing jurisdiction to accelerate or halt students’ trajectories. Just Google “SAT” and awe at the 1.2 billion search results teeming with students seeking some wondrous formula to a high score that simply doesn't exist.
Though tests succeed in objectifying the college process, they appear to do the opposite of what the College Board calls “measuring the thinking skills you’ll need to succeed in college and career” in their SAT study guide, as truly high thinking is too elusive for the confines of tests.¹ Similarly, the ACT’s website platitudinously describes its “one purpose” as “helping people achieve education and workplace success.”²
It’s as though we, as a society, offer validity to the conviction that one’s thinking ability exists within a number ranging from 400 to 1600 or 1 to 36. And one may ask, “what if this conviction is true?”
Yes, a 1600, to an extent, reflects a student’s intelligence; however, one misses the passion of a student who has a distinct interest in math, or the willingness of a student who walks hours to school to obtain an education that the rest of their family never got the chance to grasp (both are actual stories of students I met during my SAT class. The irony becomes extremely apparent as colleges often boast regarding students as “more than just a number”).
On one level, maybe testing does do some of what is claimed. Many studies reveal test scores correlate with GPA, which better depicts the totality of a student.
Yet here, in a test given so much importance, is some enough? Human nature consists of attempts to achieve the ideal, and we often accept our inability to reach perfection, yet even in acknowledgement of futility, is some sufficient?
Do I know? No.
But, maybe these are questions we should consider before settling for hours to analyze passages about frighteningly clever animals, or to assess the implications of linear models in a strange boy’s watermelon obsession.
And maybe we consider these questions, yet willfully forget amid the dread of facing our inadequacies.
Lately, I ask these questions when navigating life, distressed from my ambitions wrestling the bounds of my scores. Such are questions that I believe hold the true value of standardized tests, rather than the high scores or the laurels of high scoring students; the test which confines a fraction of the ideals of education is too imperfect for a score to even matter.
So what does matter?
Standardized testing in both its imperfect attempt to encapsulate these ideals of high school education and the impulse that compels retakes retains esteem in reflecting the human need to confront insufficiencies. Standardized testing forces us to tackle that in which we are deficient, in order to improve ourselves (at least our perception) in totality. When one engages a standardized test, they become fastened to their own obsession, meticulously studying their defects to eventually engage in a Darwinian evolution. And those aptly evolved are presented with the highest scores: a true “survival of the fittest.” Except the system is wrong because the “fittest,” in this case, aren’t peak performers, 1600’s, 36’s. The fittest are individuals who apply this forcefulness in confronting their deficiencies to everything that they do. They live with an ambition that extends past the highest scores in ways appearing socially delusional, not necessitating a numerical value.
The clock ticks. The scribbles shriek. I still sit with my anxieties dancing before me like Prospero’s puppets. Though stressed, I begin to find solace in rejecting the test, but suddenly, I shudder at the voice of the proctor. “Five minutes,” she says. I reach for my pencil, straighten my papers, and begin to write like a madman.
1. “2017 Report Overview.” CollegeBoard, 8 Sept. 2017, reports.collegeboard.org/sat-suite-program-results/overview.
Maybe, the “you” refers to the employees of the CollegeBoard, our favorite profitable non-profit, who’ve succeeded in monopolizing facets of secondary education through AP curricula and have profited from condensing the skills necessary to succeed in college and career to the ability to read and comprehend simple algebra. I think most know that “success” commands much more.
2. “Products and Services.” ACT, 8 Sept. 2017, www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services.html.
This is coming from the ACT’s website who recently sent me an email claiming, “about half of students that retest increase their scores.” If true, the company completely acknowledges the test’s incapability to measure the skill it intends. Therefore, the ACT, by its own logic, fails to fulfill its “only purpose” of “helping people achieve education and workplace success.” Yet still, I’m sure that all who have actually achieved “workplace success” attribute everything to the infamous 3 hour “bubbling session.”
Paul Agbaje is vastly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person, and so he chooses not to condense his entire life into a few meager phrases.