In today’s world and age, there’s a huge divide on what measures should be taken to evaluate students in university admission between simply evaluating their GPAs in schools and having a college entrance exam. I believe a combination of both would be a perfect balance for assessing students in university admission.
To start with, evaluating students based purely on their GPA scores has major flaws. The first flaw is that it doesn’t fully represent students’ academic abilities. For example, a rural student’s GPA is higher than an urban student’s GPA doesn’t always mean that a rural student is more accomplished in their academic abilities than an urban student as there are massive gaps in academic pressure and teaching qualities between schools in rural areas and urban areas. Moreover, several students would be under immense pressure to make their resumes look terrific to get into prestigious universities which has been proven to cause anxiety and stress among students, making it detrimental to students’ mental health. Furthermore, there’s a risk that students’ GPAs could have been modified to help students get into prestigious universities without having to accumulate knowledge, which deprives honors students of contributing to their country, causing economic progress to slow down.
It’s also noteworthy that evaluating students based purely on their scores on the college entrance exam also has its flaws. The first flaw is that it’s creating immense pressure on students to do terrific on the exam as it’s vital to whether or not they will go into a prestigious university, and consequently, this is detrimental to students’ mental health. Another flaw is that it takes away time that could have been used for the social and mental development of a student. For instance, in India, students have already started to study to prepare for India’s college entrance exam in 10th grade, taking away time that could have been used to develop essential practical skills which is crucial in the real world. Additionally, due to the high pressure, students can be underperformed in those exams. Students are still the youth of the country, and they don’t have the same pressure-resisting ability as adults, which might cause them to underperform in high-stakes exams.
In summary, we can see that although both are popular measures, they have solemn flaws. Therefore, in order to be able to fully evaluate a student’s academic abilities, I firmly believe that universities should take both measures to evaluate a student’s academic abilities in their admissions.