I have always been a little confused at the prospect of English and history standardized tests. Sure, I can buy that there might be some merit in evaluating a kid's reading comprehension, but, ultimately, I don't really see how it's going to do anyone any good. When I first started writing for The Star, I was greeted with a fair amount of skepticism from some readers -- it appeared there was a contingent of people completely unwilling to believe I'd written my pieces by myself, and while at first this left me completely aggravated, I eventually came to understand why. America might have a high literacy rate, but when it comes to actually conveying thoughts on paper, a lot of people -- adults and teenagers both -- are shockingly inarticulate. And this, I believe, is where the precious state-mandated multiple choice standardized tests are failing students. While they are easy to prepare for (because most of the material is based in rote memorization) and easy to grade (a machine does all the work!), they fail in teaching any real critical thinking, and as much as I liked bubbling in my knowledge about who the third president was, or how old a person has to be to run for senator on my eighth-grade history examination, I think I would have benefited a lot more from being asked to write an essay. Yes, an essay! A glorious and miserable essay with a thesis and a conclusion and paragraphs and paragraphs of analysis and evidence and, you know ... thought! Real intelligent thought! Thinking in school, what a concept!

    I think the two main arguments against essay-writing in school are as follows: They are hard for students to write and hard for teachers to grade. This is undeniably true, but instead of allowing ourselves to take the easy way out, we need to collectively raise our standards and make the changes necessary to really help kids learn as much as possible. Too hard for someone to grade 35 essays in a timely manner? Give more tax dollars to the schools and mandate smaller class sizes! We should never underestimate the importance of teaching our kids to formulate arguments and articulate their points. In fact, I would call any school that doesn't center its curriculum around critical thinking a waste of time -- and, unfortunately, as things are in public schools today, we are left with a whole lot of kids wasting their time. Let's not underestimate the importance of our nation's future and call for reform in public schools today!