Imagine you are just starting college; you are taking a required class and the weighted percentage of your midterm and final examination in said class is almost the entirety of your cumulative grade. You try so hard and really pay attention in said class and then you bomb the exams and boom, you fail the class.

Well, that almost happened to me.

All my life, I have been an honor roll student, getting nothing but A’s and B’s. Come freshman year, one of my required classes had a midterm and final exam both worth 40 percent of my grade; the other 20 percent was participation, which can be difficult in a lecture class full of 200 plus students. Come time for the exams, I studied for hours on end and still didn’t do well. I ended the class with a C which really can be worse but for me, it was unacceptable.

I admit that I am a horrible test taker and I know that I’m not alone.

In college, test scores determine one’s capabilities even more than in high school. The Scholastic Assessment Test, known as the SAT, that you were required to take is still a big part of the decision-making process of being accepted or rejected from the university you choose.

According to The College Board, they “strongly discourage using scores to compare or evaluate teachers, schools, districts or states because of differences in participation and test taker populations. Relationships between test scores and other background or contextual factors are complex and interdependent.”

If The College Board can recognize that scores should not evaluate performance, then why are we still letting it? For those who really aren’t good test takers like me, when is this requirement going to change?

Many colleges and universities nowadays are considered test optional, meaning they realize that test scores will not and should not be a top priority. Unfortunately, Central Connecticut is not one of them.

Coming into Central, I was extremely worried my SAT test scores would not be enough to earn that acceptance letter. However, I was luckily proved wrong.

The amount of effort you put in day in and day out is even to this day often overlooked because of the standards our society upholds us to. Hopefully, with time, these high expectations will change.

Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely students who really excel in test-taking, but for those who don’t, why are we being punished?

It’s time we start recognizing that test-taking skills are not an accurate representation of one’s abilities. Someone can be really good at something, but just because they don’t work well in a timed setting doesn’t mean they are not smart or have the same intellectual skills as someone who excels in test taking.

Just because a lot of professors use testing to determine one’s abilities in the classroom does not mean all professors do. Thankfully, there are options to avoid heavily-weighted exams.

My advice to the student struggling with exams is to do your research. Professors who tend to assign more writing assignments then exams in their classes may be a better fit for you like it is for me.

Even with alternative options, we need to start relying on in-classroom exchanges more than written exams for the sake of the students.