Bank on It | A standard system for evaluation

With the fall semester having passed, we find ourselves looking at the number that represents how successful our time really was. We pore over our grade point averages, which are calculated to the nearest 100th decimal place.

For most of us, we have high expectations — expectations that will hopefully prove true and help our GPAs remain high. Regrettably, for those of us who spend time with non-Penn students over break, we may have heard their averages and wondered why exactly we are at a so-called “top school” if our GPAs seem to be taking a hit.

For all of the students planning to go to a graduate school, it is well known that you need to keep your GPA high. So when it comes down to an admissions committee, how much of a difference does it make that our GPA is less than that of our non-Ivy competition? Will they really consider the school we went to?

This problem — one that concerns many undergraduates at Penn — must be addressed. Right now, we have standardized tests that evaluate our collegiate achievements in our areas of interest — the Medical College Admission Test, Dental Admission Test, Law School Admission Test, GRE, and GMAT. Unfortunately, one of the biggest fears of applicants from top-ranked schools is that admissions committees will turn them down in favor of students from lower-ranked schools with higher GPAs. More emphasis — if not all of it — should be placed on a single test.

Standardized testing does raise problems for those with test anxiety or who consider themselves bad test takers. Imagine the stress and work that would have to go into a single test. Critics can also point to the fact that four years of education should not boil down to one single exam.

And yet this is what many of us are already prepared to do. The pre-professional tests are critical to students who plan to go on to graduate education, and they take classes years in advance and study for months non-stop in preparation for their one exam.

There is nothing stopping us from using these tests as a measure of our academic achievement. We are already putting the work in — let’s make it worth something. In the same way that the SAT or ACT made a significant difference in college admissions, so should standardized testing for graduate school. For those students who went to top-ranked high schools or private schools, the SAT or ACT were most likely what differentiated them from other students. GPAs might have been higher for students at less-prestigious high schools, but standardized testing allowed for an across-the-board comparison.

The same comparisons can be made using scores from graduate-admissions tests. If you are attending — and paying for — a school that is supposed to offer you a better education, your standardized test scores should reflect that. Our GPAs, which only compare us to our Penn peers, are less likely to favorably weigh us against students from other schools.

Standardized testing is not perfect but it holds schools more accountable, which is what we deserve. If we find that students at less-prestigious universities are getting the same or better scores, we would need to reevaluate where the prestige of our higher-ranked school is coming from.

Standardized testing forces students to learn and not momentarily memorize. Teachers would be responsible for not just teaching material but for finding a way to educate their students beyond just the average substance so that their students would be better prepared for testing.

The standardized-testing system does have flaws, but it is only one possible solution. What we really need to do is implore the education system to find a fair way to differentiate between students — one that does not hurt those who find themselves at competitive schools.

Sarah Banks is a College sophomore from Okemos, Mich., majoring in biology and classical studies. Her e-mail address is banks@theDP.com. Bank on It appears every other Monday.

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