 Welcome to Teens on Topic. I'm your host, Emma Arnton, and today I'm joined by Grace Hall. Sorry, pop and gay. Eesa Shake. Our topic today is something that has touched us all personally, and that is the SATs. But before we get into it, let's see what people around Davis have to say about it. How do you feel about SAT and ACT and those standardized tests alike? And if you could think of a solution, what would they be? I think that the SAT and the ACT show a lot of ability to strategize and pace yourself and stuff like that, and those types of skills you'll need later. I don't think that the weight that we put on them is necessary, because in reality it's not really a test of our knowledge. It's a test of, like I said, our strategy, and there's a lot of other ways we could evaluate that. I think a solution for that would to be, I don't know, maybe figure out more ways to implement programs where we could be tested on a smaller scale, as opposed to putting so much weight on our future on such scores like that. I don't know. I think it's based, like I guess if you're going off like the SAT, it's more on like a person's just like flat-out like intellect versus like who they are as a student. There's like really lazy people who have like not as great grades. If they have like a really good SAT score, they can get into a better college. Yeah, I also don't feel like the SAT is like that great of like a judge for how smart somebody is, because it kind of just like judges you on if you're a good test taker, not how smart you are. Like you might just like completely get frazzled like in the test, and then you just suck during it, and then afterwards you know everything. So yeah, I don't really like SATs. I get frazzled. Do you guys think there are any substitutes or anything, any other better forms of valuation that the colleges could take? I don't know what would be better, but then just regular, like everybody already has tests in their like their subjects and get their transcripts so like you know how they like progress over time. So why do you need like a standardized test at the end? Yeah, maybe. I don't know, like you know how they have like interviews for like really elite colleges? Like maybe if they had that for everyone? Yeah, just like get to know people more than like their paper. I think what's most important is the enthusiasm of a student and their participation in projects and the local community. And if you have somebody that is an active learner, then they should be let in. SAT is kind of putting things at a distance that is unnecessary and probably selects out some people that shouldn't be selected out. Some people say that they really like the SATs because they don't evaluate you on your social or political standing. But other people say that college, how people are accepted into college should be more dimensional than just scores. What do you have to say about that? Well, I agree with that and I think I question the SAT itself. I think that if people are learning skills and they're doing their best to make a positive contribution to other human beings, that they should be given a chance. The SATs are useful because they allow students who don't do well academically in school to basically prove they have kept capacity to grow in a different environment. So they're useful in that regard. But of course there's always, we need to have multiple ways of evaluating students. They're around academic records should be also considered. It's too simple to just look at a score and reduce a human being to one score. People are very different in different varieties. And the different skill sets and different metrics are used. For example, social skills, there's no metric for social skills and there's no metric for artistic skills on the SAT. So we need different ways of evaluating our students to get into college. I think there's a lot of very interesting opinions. I think generally the opinion was that they weren't great. Or like more in the middle of obviously they like can't tell everything. But what did you guys think about it? I took the SAT the end of my junior year. I'm a senior now. And my experience of taking the test was okay. I'm not someone who personally does amazing on tests. I've grown up learning really good presentation skills and collaboration and more being judged merrily on subjects like that instead of specifically tests. So taking the test was a little bit different. I actually had a drive because I signed up late. And then I got to the test and it was at a different school. So I was already kind of frazzled. I didn't know anybody there. I was really nervous. And then again adding on, I'm not the best test taker. The experience of taking the test was okay. But then I got my grade back and it was a little shattering because some of the colleges I wanted to go to, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to meet their standards. So I think that it's difficult sometimes for individuals like myself who don't do as well testing knowing that I could do better than that in that grade or number doesn't exactly represent me. So generally in school I am not a shining star student. There are some classes where I really don't think that that grade reflects how much I actually understand the class or how much I sometimes even how much I enjoy that class or just my general knowledge overall. And so taking the SAT was actually very refreshing because it wasn't filled with complex calculus questions or really intricate grammar questions. It was a little, it shows you general knowledge. And so I actually did pretty okay in the SAT and I really think that that's what's going to save me a lot in my college applications because it's not about how much I know about this detailed part of physics. It's about how I know how I know everything in general. And while I do think that there are some ways that the SAT could be improved, it has, I really think that it's going to help me personally a lot, but that's my individual story. Yeah, when you have something as widespread as commonplace in the high school experience as an SAT, there's definitely going to be like an entire system set around, I mean game is kind of the wrong word, but to game the test, right? So there are camps, curriculums, books, people who make their careers make tons and tons of money off of getting parents to pay to pay them to get their student ready for the test. And so although I think from Zoe's description, it's a good way to gain general knowledge. I do think that the way that this the college board and its tests have become such an established thing in our high school experience, there's been an entire market created around doing well on the test even if you don't know the stuff, even if you are not a great student. And then there's this whole thing of, there are people who have terrible transcripts either because they don't care about their work or they have some trouble and then they'll have good and good SAT scores or there'll be four point of students who put in tons and tons of work, students at colleges would be good to have and yet they're not great with tests. So there's, I mean I've taken the PSAT and I got a pretty good score, but I think there are people who are much more capable than me who got lower scores just because they haven't had that experience taking that many tests. In my elementary school we did tons of tests. I remember actually liking taking the star tests in elementary school. But I think definitely when we always, when we rely, colleges are doing a better job at this, but when we start to rely on things like an SAT, like an SAT and college admissions, there are issues. There's going to be a market set up around trying to get around it. There's going to be factors that the SAT can't gauge like that guy was talking about. I mean colleges do look at stuff outside, they do look at community service and at extracurriculars and stuff like that. It's just that there's, it's a given that there are going to be issues with something like that. Yeah, I think that the SAT is a very specific type of knowledge that not everyone's going to be good at. Like that I think that's like not everyone's going to be great at taking the SAT because maybe they're a bad test taker, maybe that specific aspect of what the SAT is graded on is just not something that you excel at. But I think I, even though I didn't get, I didn't get a great score on the SAT, I think that it's still important because it has a general baseline for everyone to use. Because I'm confident that the education that I got is easier than some schools, harder than others. So that my performance against someone who went to a really elite private school, if we had the same GPA, we probably don't have exactly the same difficulty of classes that we took or a rigor of course load. So I think colleges are doing a much better job at having a more holistic approach at admission. So I think that, that even if you don't do well in the SATs, that there's still different aspects of your application that can shine through. So I think that as long as SATs aren't the main aspects that people are graded on, if like there's more variety in how colleges look at an applicant, then I think the SATs are fine. It's also not really even a, someone in the interviews was talking about how it doesn't measure your artistic skill or your social skills. I think it really kind of goes beyond that because there are, in a college application, if you are applying to major in art, they will often ask for a portfolio and so in a way that solves the problem. It also just doesn't evaluate your enthusiasm to be at that school or your passion for whatever you're going for. It just analyzes your general, it really, it just analyzes your general knowledge and I think that's a bit of a cold statistic to have, especially for something as important as college because a person is more than just a couple of scores in a GPA. That person has a political standpoint, social views, maybe they're a bit conservative, maybe they're a bit liberal, but they're much more than that score and so I think that some colleges, lots of people hold the SATs a little bit more than it's actually worth. Yeah, I think in any sort of admission process, you're not going to get the whole student. It's so hard to get a person and translate it into like a 2D application. That's just not going to happen and I think what was brought up that interviews were definitely a good point and I think that interviews are definitely a better way to gauge someone, although I do know people that just aren't good at that sort of thing so I think that also has its flaws and every aspect of the application appeals to a different type of person, but I also realize that interviews are really hard to do. There's so many people applying to college that you just, you couldn't possibly interview them all. You couldn't get someone to just interview every single applicant so I think that would be the easiest and most fair choice in my opinion, but I think it's a thing that would not work. I think anything that goes into a cause, there are some people who have the resources or are really good at contorting themselves, contorting their profile to be a perfect applicant, so you can be a jerk socially but in that interview you show up and be awesome. You cannot have maybe the best extracurriculars but during high school your parents pay for all of this training. So there's definitely going to be people who have the resources or are just personally really good at and really motivated to contort themselves towards that profile that a college is looking for and then there will be people who don't want to spend their entire lives getting ready for college for four years and that's fine, but when we see people all clamoring to get into, I mean nobody is going to apply to Sac State and be so obsessive but when you see this culture of people obsessively applying to Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, even UC Davis, there will be this kind of yoga to get to the right pose that UC Davis is looking for and then there's this larger thing of the culture around stuff like SATs around standardized testing which is the idea that I mean I'm sure people hear this from in the majority of schools from the first year freshman years that you should go to college, you need to go to college and although that's true for a ton of people it's not the case for everybody. We as a society have devalued work at good paying, I mean it's not like you have to work a minimum wage job if you're not going to college, there are tons and tons of good jobs. I know we look down on plumbers but plumbers can make tons and tons of money without having to go to college and college is just not everybody needs to go to school for all those years because what we do is we set people up for failure throughout high school you're working to college, college, college, college you get tons and that's why we see so many people go to college and leave after the first couple of semesters which is we set people up only for college and then they have they have jobs that they don't like and they don't have a complete diploma they have a couple of units in the bank and they're just not happy and that's why I think we kind of need to take the emphasis off college for everybody that one-size-fits-all approach which has been such a problem in our education for such a long time. Yeah I completely agree I think college is good for some people and is not good for others like if you have no idea what you want to do in your life college might not be the right choice for you immediately like maybe you want to take a gap here maybe you want to go to community college maybe you don't want to go to college. I think the emphasis that everyone needs to go to college is a really harmful mindset because it's not right for everyone and I think it's getting more and more progressive as if you look through history a college education has different values throughout like in the beginning it was a lot more like prestigious to have a college education but now it's kind of like the starting block and even then it's like we went to college but you don't have 10 years of experience like to get into this relatively starting level job. Yeah every graduate school is becoming like a requisite every every decade it's just becoming more and more college you have to have a not just an associate but a bachelor's you just have to have a master's you have to have a phd it's just becoming more and more of a not just a status thing but like a requirement you should have all this college with all this education that you're not necessarily going to need. Not to mention it's also priced as a luxury it's like socially it's like you're kind of required but then it's like 70 grand a year for some of the top schools top schools in the US and it's yeah exactly you're set up to fail. I think we talked a lot about a lot of good and interesting topics today thank you so much for joining me I think this is personally I think it's just going to get worse and more severe the college admission process as it gets more selective every year but thank you again for joining me and come join us next week