As current college students, we have all endured the early Saturday morning SAT or ACT exams to gain college acceptance. We have all spent valuable time and money cramming as many foreign words into our brains that would fit, only to forget most of them the next day. However, these tests do not actually seem to measure knowledge, but instead measure how well people can stuff knowledge into their brain during the exam and then forget it later. College entrance exams need to be based on different criteria and rate students based on other talent fields.

Many colleges seem to be taking notice of the alternative talents of students. A USA Today article written by journalist Katrin Park noted that high school seniors are now being granted acceptance through more accurate tests, including other nationally-accredited exams other than the SATs, essays, and research papers. This allows students to actually display their natural talents and not stress their worse qualities. Unfortunately, most of the nation’s colleges are still stuck on the traditional entrance exams and more and more students are being denied acceptance into their top choice schools because of a next-to-impossible exam.

The traditional way to weed out prospective students is to set a cut-off score. If a student doesn’t meet it, he or she won’t be accepted into the school, regardless of how badly they wanted to attend the school or how hard they worked to get the grade that they did. If schools were more lenient and looked more into the other talents of prospective students and not just a number on their transcript, campuses would be even more populated with talented students in all areas of study, not just math, reading, and writing.