As a sophomore in college, I have taken many many tests in my lifetime. Along with a lot of other students around the country, it was one of my biggest challenges, more specifically, standardized testing. I was never the best standardized test taker in school at all, I always had great anxiety while taking tests. I am successfully doing the best I can be at Quinnipiac University right now. I may have not gotten the best score on my SAT or got 100's on every test, but I am still doing what I want to do at the university i want to be at WITHOUT the help from test taking.
Tests puts so much pressure on students with information that you rarely need to know again in your life. For example, the SATs test you on almost nothing you have learned in your lifetime, but essentially decide your future. Taking tests is worthless to students because it doesn’t really test your true abilities as a student. It restricts you from being creative and basically makes you stick to memorization and not expressing yourself as a student.
Tests are something students will study hours for and still not get anywhere with it. They won’t learn from the experiencing the test. IN the end, test taking is not something that you will need to carry with you in your future. When you get a job, it is more important to be able to be creative and expand your horizons of learning things in the real world, then taking a test / learning the way to test take. Not only do tests create stress, they also make students feel discouraged. After taking a hard test that you studied all night for, and not getting the results they expected, it shoots their confidence down. On the other hand, even if a student does well on a test, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily know the material. There is really no benefits for students to take tests. Yes, grades and GPA are important but it is more important that a student is getting the most out of their education that can help them pursue their careers and dreams later in life.
At lot of people may say, "oh, you can't take tests? Maybe you're just stupid." And for a lot of my life I debated that, but even when I tried my absolute hardest to do well, I just could never get over the performance anxiety of taking a test. This anxiety took over how I did on the test just because of all the hype that is behind the test. All I have to say is that, test taking puts a lot of necessary pressure on a student and should not be a KEY factor in decided what college they go to or even what their future might be. I feel like as time goes on, tests should become more and more irrelevant to a students' future because of how worthless they really are to students and their education.