Standardized testing is a slippery slope at times. On the one hand, you have people who think that because their test scores are a certain way they either don’t have to try anymore or they confirm that they are in fact the cream of the crop. But on the other hand, you also have people who think that the mediocrity of their test scores (since, by definition most students are going to be in that broad group known as “somewhere in the middle”) means that they are just mediocre people by nature. While this is true in some senses of the word, it may not be reasonable to put such measurements on people.

After all, everyone has both strengths and weaknesses. And for some people, their greatest strength lies in aligning themselves with people who have strengths which they personally lack. True, not everyone is Henry Ford, who sued someone for libel and won his case by calling in his various experts on any given topic on which he might be questioned. Wouldn’t it be lovely to just hire people who know pretty much any kind of information you might ever want to have available to you? There’s a very good reason why onlinembarankings.com is accessible to anyone, after all.

No matter where you fall in the spectrum on standardized tests, you can achieve pretty much anything you can imagine yourself doing. If you think of yourself as an underachiever, then that’s what you’ll be. If you think of yourself as someone who performs at the optimal level all the time, then you have a destiny of being amazing ahead of you. How you see yourself is infinitely more important than what your aggregate skills and aptitudes are on one given day. The problem every educational system is going to have to deal with is, how do we identify the skills of our students?