The SAT

The SAT holds tremendous power in determining where you will go to college. To go to virtually any college or university in the United States, you need to have taken the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a standardized exam that assigns you a score that ranks your verbal and math abilities. The SAT is not an intelligence test; rather, it is a predictor of college success. College admissions committees use the SAT to get a general idea of your scholastic aptitude. Each section of the SAT is graded on a scale of 200 - 800, with 500 being the average score. Though many colleges require the SAT for admission because it is a standard way of measuring a student's ability to do college-level work, there are many problems with it.

Colleges and universities have been using the SAT to select their students who apply to them. According to College Board, the SAT is a test that measures students' abilities which they will use to be able to do well in universities or colleges. In addition, the SAT shows how well the students solve the problems and how well the education they have gotten. The SAT consists of ten sections which consist of one 25-minute essay section, two 25-minute and one 20-minute math problem sections, four 25-minute, one 20-minute, and one 10-minute English problem sections. Therefore, the total time to do all the sections is three hours and forty-five minutes.

No test can accurately predict with 100 percent certainty what your grades will be in college. This is because many factors, including personal motivation, influence your college grades. Colleges use SAT scores to help estimate how well students are likely to do at its school. Knowing your SAT helps the college make a decision about how likely it is that you'll do well at the school, but for many their first year of college grades are different from what their SAT scores had predicted for them. The oldest and most familiar accusation against standardized tests is that they are discriminatory. The prime evidence for this charge is the test results themselves.