Who are you?
My sister is the typical fourteen year old. She sleeps until 2pm on week-ends, is most often seen with earplugs, argues with just about everyone on just about everything for no apparent reason half of the time, and the other half she absolutely doesn’t care about the rest of the world. But then again, that’s her job, she’s only fourteen. The other day she came home, suffering for what seemed to be a small panic attack. Apparently, her course curriculum in High School now includes a class, which has the sole purpose of helping (or pushing) students to figure out what they want to do with their lives.
Nothing wrong with the idea. It is true that a majority of us find ourselves in front of our application letters, completely clueless about how we should occupy the next forty years of our lives. What made me cringe though, was when my sister told me they made each student complete a test online to assess what they should do with their lives. My sister’s main results suggested that she become either an administrative clerk, or an orientation advisor — thus the small panic attack that I witnessed.
First, I started wondering about the validity of that test in assessing not only the interests of a student, but their true potential. So I went on the website and took the test myself, trying to understand its ramifications. It’s called an Aptitude Test, and is divided in five categories : the activities you like to perform, what you want to learn, your talents, your personality, and the setting in which you want to work. You answer on a scale of a vague “more” or “less” for each statement. The test really touches all the important aspects to consider when choosing a career, although it requires a good knowledge of the self. As a teenager who may not know who they want to be as a person or citizen, the results may be more confusing than anything. Even myself, I had trouble choosing! But that’s all before I started reading the very, very small characters at the bottom of the web page, saying that indeed, this test’s validity has not be proven scientifically, making me wonder even more why they would assign the test to hundreds of students. It really brings us back to the importance of acknowledging the reliability of a test before using it, since you can never really assess the consequences of its results on the examinees — in this case, fourteen years old kids, more confused than ever before.
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