Fall can be a stressful time especially for high school seniors applying to college. Whether it be visiting that “perfect college”, scrambling to make Early Action, or being distracted by the MLB being in full swing, teens seem to spend more time pulling hair and shouting into pillows than any other time of one’s high school career. But the most awkward topic I always came across was discussing ACT and SAT scores. The angst in young adults to compare themselves to each other is one of the strongest forces that drove us to excel at what we did; but when it comes out that the quiet, 4.0 GPA, asian boy got a 24 and doesn’t come to school for a week, this can be as emotionally tolling as being shoved into a locker by a traditional bully.
Whether it be the smart girls that won’t study for less than 6 hours a night and are in every club or the stoners toking a J behind the dumpsters during lunch, almost every high school student is constantly trying to be better than each other to impress parents, teachers, or peers. This competition is unhealthy especially for hormonally unbalanced students; and when standardized test scores are expected to be a public topic, students can become uncomfortable and self conscious. While this may not matter to the under-achievers that have no more plans than taking over their parents’ furniture store, this a large point of contention among the students that care about their grades.
I definitely think that studying for these large tests and being able to complete them confidently is definitely its own type of literacy. One needs to know how to first approach the questions, how to decipher them, and then must know what the appropriate response looks like. Many times there are students taking the test who have no idea what to do and their first experience learning this literacy is actually taking the test. In other cases, there are people who have practice hard and study every night in preparation. In the end, how well the students do comes down to prior knowledge, of both the material being covered as well as how they must interact with the text itself. I think in the end, testing can prove difficult for no other reason than the test-taker is ignorant of what the expectations and conventions are of the test.