Every year more than one million high school seniors take the SAT and ACT in hopes of scoring high enough to get into the college of their choice. This is not always possible, even for the smartest students and the best test takers. The SAT and ACT are used as an estimate of how a student will do in his or her first year of college, not the rest of their college career. Several studies claim that the SAT and ACT are biased against minorities, women and low income students. No test is good enough to serve as the sole or primary basis for important educational decisions. By design these tests are "speeded" which means that many test takers are unable to finish all the questions. Therefore, these tests are inaccurate in assessing most areas of thinking. That is why I believe standardized tests create a social problem in our society. .

             The SAT I: Reasoning Test covers verbal and mathematical reasoning abilities and is said to be approximately 1/2 math. Many schools, which are out of state, require students to take the SAT. The SAT Verbal Section tests a student's ability to understand and analyze what he reads, recognize relationships between parts of a sentence, and see relationships between pairs of words. On the SAT I, there are 19 analogy questions, 19 sentence completion questions, and 40 critical reading questions. The SAT Math Section requires students to solve problems involving arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. Calculators may be used. Some questions do not include answer choices. The SAT I contains 35 questions which are the standard five-choice multiple choice questions, 15 questions that are four-choice quantitative comparison questions, and 10 questions that are student-produced response questions. The SAT lasts three hours. A student receives two scores -- one for the verbal section and one for the math section. The scores range from 200 to 800 on each of the two sections.