For Asian Americans, standardized testing is its own costly, hyper-competitive culture
Over the weekend, 16-year-old Mira Hu went missing in San Marino, California. Hu—a student at San Marino High School—had been dropped off at nearby Arcadia High School on Saturday to take the SAT college entrance exam. However, when her parents arrived to pick her up, Hu was nowhere to be found: hours later, she sent a text message to her brother that said Hu was running away due to the pressure of her SAT exam performance and the college admissions process. (Thankfully,she turned up unharmed, police reported on Tuesday.)
Hu’s distraught father told KTLA-TV that his daughter is “a perfect kid.”Yet, perhaps it is precisely this pressure to be “a perfect kid” that could be causing anxiety for students like Mira Hu.
As the debate over college admissions reaches new heights in the Asian American community—Emil Guillermo of Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund rightfully labels it the new Asian American civil war—the question of whether colleges should use a more holistic review process or base admissions decisions primarily or exclusively on high-stakes college entrance exams.
The inadequacies of the SATs in predicting college success has been well-discussed. There has been less time spent, however, on the psychological impact of such high-stakes testing: the extreme pressure it places on high school and college students,.
It is well-known among mental health researchers that teenagers and young adults are are at a high risk for anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Roughly one in three college students experience depressionsymptoms so severe they impact daily functions. Meanwhile, anxiety levels among high-school students continue to worry mental health advocates.
A major contributor to this anxiety is the college admissions process, which for many students becomes a veritable horse race of intensive testing. While societal inequity allows some students to fallcompletely through the cracks, other students are inundated with the message that every aspect of their lives should be focused on getting into a prestigious college.
For some Asian American children, the pressure to attend a selective four-year university can hit extreme heights. In an op-ed published CNN last year, Jeff Yang writes:
It’s a common running joke among second-generation Asian Americans that our parents start us on college prep before we begin potty training. The joke didn’t seem so funny to me when I was a kid, however. I remember earning minutes of TV by defining vocabulary words correctly—while I was still in fourth grade. I remember being rewarded for finishing homework early by getting extra “mommy homework,” which always involved problem sets and practice exams from a dog-eared stack of Princeton Review test prep tomes.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that even within the already high rates of anxiety among the nation’s college students, Asian Americans, especially women, experience relatively high rates ofanxiety and suicidal ideation.
Students are told that every waking minute should be dedicated to building their college application package, with an extreme priority placed on studying for standardized exams like the SATs. An entire economy exists within (middle class and wealthy) Asian American communities providing for the intense grooming of prospective applicants. Some families reportedly pay thousands of dollars for college preparatory programs that micromanage every aspect of a child’s life.
Failure is not an option. In their new book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou have documented how our community’s emphasis on high achievement—our “success frame”—can place significant stress on Asian American children. In short, our children are told that their entire self-worth is dependent upon getting into a school like Harvard, and that if they perform below expectations on a single exam, they are total failures. How can we not be concerned about the psychological toll that kind of pressure will have?For Asian Americans, standardized testing is its own costly, hyper-competitive culture - Quartz:
