Letter to the Boston Globe

My SAT scores arrived in the mail today.  By college entrance standards, they were low.  I am a senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin.  I love school, but I cannot perform on standardized tests.  The pressure of having to produce answers without time to reflect incapacitates me.

I have been waiting for those scores because, more than any other factor, they would tell me to which colleges I have access.  When I opened the envelope from the Admissions Testing Program and looked at the scores, I felt as if a knife were driven through my heart.

I am in the top eight percent of my graduating class of five hundred and am in the National Honor Society. But those things are not enough. I am also expected to achieve a certain score on the SATs to gain entrance to the colleges I have chosen.

I have to think about things before I can act. But on the SAT you have to act fast. Why is it better to be able to answer questions quickly than to take time with it? And why is the SAT–a test of specific bits of information set up in a format that tricks you into choosing the wrong answers–used as the ultimate national testing standard?

Where is the test that measures the effort that I have put in and the progress I have made in high school, that shows how well I can reason and think about issues, that shows how much I want to make the world a better place?

I am sitting on my bed thinking that the years of effort made in school have been diminished, or even erased, by this one test.  I am furious that as of today my options are narrowed because I have been viewed through a tiny lens which has the power to shape my future but through which I cannot be seen.  

Alexei Nichols
Cambridge

Reprinted by permission of the author.