Alfie Kohn, an American author and lecturer in the areas of education, parenting, and human behavior, asserts that the more the tests are made to “count” the more anxiety is going to rise, making the scores less valid, in his book "The Case Against Stanadardized testing:Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools. According to Kohn,no matter how prepared someone may be before the test, there are an infinite number of variables that can influence their performance. For example, a student could be confident going into the test, knowing all of the material, but perhaps got a bad sleep the night before, and the lack of sleep affects their ability to remember all of the information, influencing the score.
Alfie Kohn
Steven E. Stemler, a professor at Wesleyan University, has spent nearly two decades studying the purposes of school and how those purposes get measured via testing. In his article, “What Should University Admissions Tests Predict?” in Educational Psychologist. Stemler, he asserts that the tests are not accurate indicators of college success because they measure only specific content domains like physics and history, when cognitive abilities like critical thinking and ethical reasoning are equally, if not more important
Steven E. Stemler
Steven Syverson, in his article, "The Role Of Standardized Tests In College Admissions: Test-Optional Admissions" in New Directions For Student Services, discusses the fact that many students identify as poor test takers, which contributes to the unfairness of the tests. According the article, this lack of confidence in test taking often results in poor performance due to anxiety and stress about the tests, another reason for inaccuracies in the test scores and another reason why these tests cannot be relied on to determine a student’s acceptance to a college or university.
Steven Syverson
Renee M. Fauria and Luana J. Zellner, professors at Sam Houston University, wrote an article, “College Students Speak Success” in the Journal of Adult Development”, asserting that there is increasing evidence that non-cognitive variables are predictors of college success, which contradicts the use of intelligence-based tests as exclusive criteria for college admission and that intelligence does not necessarily correlate with getting good grades, making the effectiveness of aptitude tests to predict academic success questionable. (No photo pf Luana J. Zellner available)