PSAT Testing Day - October 16th, 2019
By: Andrew Nagy
The PSAT is a standardized test administered by the College Board and is cosponsored by the National Merit Scholarship Foundation.
Approximately 3.5 million students take the PSAT each year, all across America and beyond. This year, most high schools in California are administering the test on October 16th, 2019.
Many may ask why this test is particularly important, and here both points of view will be represented.
First, many schools administer this test in order to track students’ progress, as well as to give students a way to gain self-understanding in the regards of whether they need to improve on such a test or not. Furthermore, the PSAT and tests alike allow students to prepare and gain an understanding of what they will be tested on and specifically what forms of questions will be administered. In order to be admitted to most colleges, specifically UC’s, CSU’s and private schools, people MUST take the SAT and it is many times mandatory to publicly display these scores, but an individual can also choose on some applications whether to replace such a score with the ACT. Generally, many individuals do significantly better on one test compared to the other, but this is always subjective to every person.
Sitting in such test environments trains the mind and molds thought processes. Constantly taking such tests better prepares students for what is ahead and that is very important to their success in the future. In contrast, one detriment can be explained by the lack of diversity in thought, where individuals are almost forced to think within the parameters of certain circumstances in problems throughout such extensive tests. Similar conceptions can be observed within high schools today with the constant formative writing prompts, and the lack of creative writing overall. Moreover, a large percentage of students observe that within the ELA curriculum, there are more one-sided anti-American and anti-democracy essays, poems, and works of writing that condition the mind to express parallelism in order to gradually conform to the general consensus. Whether that means the education system is teaching teenagers and children to think a certain way positively or confine thoughts and dreams collectively and detrimentally, is up to each individual to determine themselves.
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