(Obviously hyperbole, but also, where's the lie?)
Standardized testing has become the great American past-time. Isn't it lovely? Forcing teachers to teach for a test, teaching students to learn for results, not for learning itself, that's exactly what Plato had in mind back in the Academy!
There are multiple issues with standardized testing. The first is that not everyone has the same quality of education - disproportionately, poor and BIPOC communities are 'hit the hardest', although of course there are many many exceptions. Of course, this leads many colleges to either have different standards for different backgrounds, or to throw out the tests altogether. So what the hell is point? To make colleges feel 'good', to make them feel like they have a proper way to filter kids out? I really don't understand. I'll keep elaborating.
Before I get to this next criticism, let me say that it grinds my gears when people talk about 'different ways of learning'. This is some sore BS to compensate for bad teaching and an awful education system. Somehow after twelve years in the meat grinder, people come out thinking they didn't learn cause 'the school didn't teach them for their way', not becase the whole program was fundamentally flawed. What's the flaw?
Well far be it to declare that standardized testing is the fundamental problem, but it is at least reflective of the problem - this insane idea that we have to measure everything, even if those measurements are totally bogus, in hopes that they correlate to something real. This is the same problem with IQ tests - anyone with half a brain will tell you that IQs don't "precisely" mean something, but that they "correlate" to something, vaguely. Well, what's the damn point in knowing the number then? Anyone with an ounce of self-reflection understands roughly how smart they are - they don't need a number that tells them roughly how smart they are. And if someone doesn't understand how smart they are, an IQ test isn't gonna change their mind - they'll just tell you IQ tests aren't perfect! It's a useless number, because it is making an stupid measurement.
Stupid measurements are not just dumb because they are intrinsically dumb, they are dumb because they make people labor for stupid ends. There are people out there, I guarantee you, who try to do better on an IQ test. I bet you there are people you can pay to coach you. You can pay to listen to Jordan Petersen tell you why IQ scores really are important. There is a whole cottage industry based on this dumb idea, and that is all wasted human potential.
Now maybe this is not a national thing, I'm not sure (America is weird as hell), but in my state, kids are always studying for standardized tests, 365 days a year (not literally, since they have summer and winter break, and weekends, I guess - but even then! You can go to some terrible black hole of fun to study for these BS tests). Teachers, human beings qualified to actually teach, have to waste their potential, all of their training to actually teach, to teach standardized tests. Cause if they don't teach standardized tests, oops, now they're on the chopping block.
This is really, really bad. Not JUST because standardized testing is tedious and systemically unfair, but because you aren't teaching kids how to 'learn' or 'think' - these ideas have somehow been compressed into the buzzword 'critical think', which if you think about it, should actually be redundant, but it's not when kids have to do BS work for twelve years.
Not everyone is going to enjoy learning as much as the next person. But learning is a very 'human' activity. The world is full of mystery and wonder, and as we acquire more knowledge, as we gain facility with solving the puzzles of life, we see more and more connections. As you learn more history, you do not simply gain a linearly-increasing stack of knowledge, you gain a richer web of understanding. This is the same for any field.
Now how exactly do you gain a richer web of understanding? You learn something here and there, and eureka! this third fact you learned sometime before makes a lot more sense. You connect dots. You get these lightbulb moments. You learn to have lightbulb moments. It's hard to explain, because learning is so complex, so fluid... so human. And then some morons want to NOT ONLY cram all of that experience into a moronic multiple-choice test, they want you to pay for it???.
I haven't taken the SAT or ACT in a long time, I don't remember the content that well, but I can guarantee you, it is more reflective of how well you have studied those topics (both in class, and explicitly for those tests), than how smart you are. Yes, it also tests a bit how smart you are... but again, a bad measurement you don't need anyways (I'll come back to that). I DO remember from the SAT they had questions about increasingly obtuse vocabulary, and what the words meant. Do you realize how stupid it is to test how familiar a student is with a dictionary?
I'm more familiar with the 'math' stuff though (and science). On the GRE (which I've recently taken), the 'quant' section was absolutely smooth-brained in design. The questions on there are the sort of questions that, had you taken engineering and physics classics throughout college, you'll pass with flying colors (ie combinatorics, probability, geometry, etc.). If you hadn't, well, you're not gonna do as good. And take a guess which majors do best on the quant section?? Engineers and physicists. Who do moderately well?? Biologists and chemists (who have presumably taken a physics course or two, and also there's physical chemistry which has a bit of that). Guess who does poorly?? Everyone else. Probably cause they don't take the corresponding classes, not because they are less facile with quantitative scores. My point is, these tests aren't testing anything that your transcript won't show. It's an absolute waste of time. (also you might say "well some colleges are better than others, an A in Calc III from Harvard is different than an A in Calc III at X community college... let me say... calc III is the same exact thing no matter where you go).
(You can also tell these tests are dumb because some programs ignore sections of the GRE - yet you still pay to take the damn thing! And judge yourself over your scores! Absolute madness. The logical flow: I took more probability classes, more thermodynamics classes, more stat mech classes than you - then I did better in a test that correlates with me taking these courses - you should feel dumb for doing worse on the test than me. Absolute madness.)
The reading portion is mostly fine on the GRE, since most people have to read throughout college. It's still kinda dumb, but since the whole test is dumb, that's not surprising. Maybe there are deeper flaws with it I'm not aware of, but my main criticism lays with the quant section, since I'm most familiar with it.
So you have this terrible quant section, which measures something totally unrelated to most people's work, and then you have a whole damn cottage industry dedicated to studying for this damn section. People waste their time and money (well not 'waste' if they get into the program because of their studying, but 'waste' because it is intrinsically a stupid system to have) preparing for this. It's a waste of human potential.
The greatest sin here is what I said in the title of this section. People think 'learning' or 'studying' is this slogfest. People think math is this awful, awful, tedious subject. While factually untrue (probably), I'm gonna go ahead and blame the decline and fall of America on standardized testing. It is absolutely stupid, makes people think learning and math are terrible, and probably helped cultivate the culture with a stereotype of 'stupid Americans that don't wanna study the "hard stuff"', a culture where 'I'm not good with numbers' is a reflexive answer when people see math (side note: barely anyone is good with numbers. Barely any mathematician deals with actual arithmetic and calculation.).
Then on top of that, the salt in the wound, is that because these tests test stuff like how well your teachers taught you to do monkey math, how much you've read (and with all of the support and encouragement that can require), it builds in systemic biases against poor and colored people. These are self-reinforcing. The truly ludicrous thing is, the measurement isn't even a good one! This is an awful system on every level. I'm no opponent of standardized education (in fact I think that'd be good), but standardized testing (especially predatory capitalists tests which were designed by idiots) are destroying this country's youth's minds. Get it out of here!