Shannon Nichols feels confident in her ability as a student and writer before the ninth- grade proficiency test, she’s never slipped below a 3.0 and even has gotten her writing televised. When she fails the proficiency test initially Nichols is devastated and confused. She dedicates her time to studying in preparation to re-take the test with no avail, she fails a second time. This time around Nichols is bitter ” Apparently- I told myself- the people grading the test didn’t have the slightest clue about what constituted good writing” she says. The author struggles to recover from her failures and starts to detest writing. She does great in school but when standardized testing is put into the picture all those skills and hard work go out the window, she feels as if standardized testing has made her consequential as a writer. No longer putting in effort and barely passing high-school English. Shannon feelings don’t change, she no longer loves writing as she used to, she wishes she could’ve known what she did that first time around, maybe it would’ve saved her relationship with writing. I related to Nichols’s feelings towards standardized testing, there’s a multitude of reasons that standardized test are a bad judgement of someone’s intelligence or skills. I’m a STEM major and failing high school geometry twice made me wonder if maybe science isn’t the major for me, I do not doubt this a feeling that will reappear in college. Despite being a science major, English classes bring the most dread. I’m not a confident writer and struggle with making things flow and worry that I’m not meeting expectation’s. I think a big reason for my distaste for English comes from the fact that it has a lot to do with opinions, one thing might sound great to one and a dumpster fire to another at the same time.
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