For as long as I can remember, standardized tests meant two things: that I’d be forced to carefully fill in little bubbles for several hours, and that my parents would eventually receive my scores in the mail. But even in my naïve junior high years I realized that someone somewhere, for whatever reason, felt that it was absolutely necessary for me to take those long and boring tests.

Take the SAT for example. As if a three-hour test wore not long enough, College Board decided to extend the length to almost four hours in March 2005. The format of the test itself was altered quite a bit with the intention of creating a clearer picture of the average American student’s aptitude. However, as far as I can tell, all the terrible tests we take throughout our high school careers (including the PSAT, SAT, ACT, AP exams, and SAT subject tests) don’t tell us anything about how smart a person is—just how long he or she can stay awake and attentive.

As the average teenager’s attention span is usually 15 to 20 minutes on a good day, it seems completely irrational to make the standardized tests so long. No amount of practice and studying can fully prepare even the most focused student for that mid-test slump that so often leads to careless mistakes in the later portions. That then raises a few interesting questions. Is a four-hour test too long or too short to truly test one’s scholastic knowledge? Do the questions really represent the basics that every high school student in America should recognize? Does a single high score make a student smart?

SAT courses and prep books promise higher scores by teaching good test-taking techniques and general patterns of the test. But what good is a higher score if the only function it serves is as a ticket to college? In recent years, a number of liberal arts colleges, including Middlebury and Bates, have made the SAT optional on the grounds that academically, it doesn’t say enough about the applicant. The brightest students may have difficulty with the test-taking process, while poor students can eventually master the right techniques and excel on the SAT. The courses and books do a great job getting students ready for the tests, but that’s basically all they do.

They don’t teach us anything significantly new or useful that we can use in our lives after the test is done. The analytical approaches taught for the critical reading sections can’t be applied practically to most of the reading we’ll be doing in higher education. The process of elimination fails miserably in the world outside of five bubbles. The test itself is severely limited in its content and scoring, based on a scale of 2400. Students of all academic backgrounds and levels are compared arbitrarily to one standard that doesn’t go into much depth on any of the subjects it claims to test.

Simply put, the standardized tests used today for college admissions do not accurately portray the students who take them. I think it’s unfortunate that we have to take them, and that they count for so much in most college applications. It just seems like such a waste of time to prepare for and commit to tests that provide only a shallow glimpse of our ability and knowledge. There are better ways to prove one’s worth to colleges. And more importantly, who wants to get into college because of his or her uncanny ability to fill in bubbles and read directions carefully?