Although I wrote an essay about why board exams aren’t beneficial to college admissions, ideally there are a few things that the board exams accomplish.

The board exams give the colleges something to compare students with students who are not of the same school. Grades and GPAs are biased in each school. An A in Calculus for one school is not the same A in Calculus for another, as teachers have different teaching styles, different levels of difficulty on exams, and different grading scales. The SAT is designed to put everybody on the same scale, and thus should provide some significant detail on how you compare to other applicants.

In addition, the exam also promotes the learning of proper grammar, reading skills/comprehension, vocabulary, writing, and math. Testing the students on these basic concepts prior to college acceptance would allow colleges to see how students fare on the basic subjects. Univeristies would not look highly on students who require numerous lower level noncredited classes that must be taken with community college teachers.

The subject tests (SAT2) also show colleges an applicant’s understandings of advanced subjects such as Math/Calculus, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, History, etc. If your going to be a bio major or a chemistry major, it would be good to show the colleges that you scored well on these tests, as it affirms your potential to do as well in college courses.

Try the following and make the most of it…go for qulaity instead of quantity. In using the inner circle (also called fishbowl) technique I announce that at the next class meeting we are going to have a class within a class, with 6 to 15 students acting as the discussion group and the others as observers. Classroom has movable chairs? Then arrange the seating in concentric circles. Students who are normally silent will talk when they feel the increased sense of responsibility as members of the inner circle. This “fishbowl” can be used in small, as well as large, classes. Tell students that at the next class meeting the teacher chooses 6 to 15 students to be “in the fishbowl.” You then conduct a discussion (based on the work to date) with the students in the fishbowl. The rest of the students are to act as observers and recorders, noting both the process and the content of the discussion. Before the end of the class period, observers write a brief summary of the discussion and/or answer the question, “What would you have said that wasn’t said?”