I. Attention Getter: Students across the United States stand by their mailboxes, or in modern days, constantly hit the refresh button, anxiously waiting for the score that will seal their academic fate.
II. Connection to Audience: Raise your hand if you ever took the ACT and/or SAT? Everyone in here should have because most colleges require either or in order to be accepted and admitted into the school, including Mizzou. I myself took the ACT three times (credibility). Therefore, we have all experienced the heavy amount of pressure, the nerve-racking time limits, and the “oh my gosh I only have more five minutes but two whole columns left to bubble” feeling. But most importantly, we all understand how much college admission hinges on how well we perform on these standardized tests.
III. Thesis Statement and Preview: However, standardized testing has long-standing problems of inaccuracy, inequalities, and inducing test anxiety which I will later discuss in detail. Because of these flaws, the college …show more content…
Some students are simply bad test takers, particularly under stress, such as when a test may grant or deny college admission. In fact, high test anxiety is a key contributor to poor test performance according to psychological professor Jerrell Cassady (Cassady, 2001). In his scientific study, when stress was induced in artificial testing conditions, test anxiety was a causal agent in determining performances. Interestingly, in testing conditions with no induced stress or test anxiety, the high test anxiety group outperformed the low test anxiety students (Cassady, 2001). Therefore, students with cognitive test anxiety have a distinct disadvantage on standardized tests. Considering the SAT and ACT are proven to cause cognitive test anxiety, lessening the value of standardized test scores from the college admission process would greatly benefit those students (Lash, 2015). As a result, disadvantaged students would be undeterred from applying to college as a