Tests that make us standard

While I see the overall purpose for using standardized tests to assess where the overall population of students are at, I think the way they are set up is completely infuriating.  I remember taking the ACT in high school and the way I prepared for it was learning test taking strategies.  I thought the whole idea of this test is to see how students have learned and what they have learned, not how well they can take a test.  I would consider myself a fairly intelligent individual, but I am a poor test taker.  I take too long because I analyze the questions and answers and I for some reason can just not do well on a test.  Due to this lack of skill, I didn't do quite as well as I should have on the ACT because I was not being tested on the content.  I scored the best on science, and as Professor Kruse pointed out, those are more of a reading test than a science test.  I am a very strong reader, so I did well on that part.  In reality, I suck at science.  But since I am able to read a problem and solve it based on that reading, I did well in that subject.  I don't think we should get rid of standardized tests, I think they need to be rewritten.  It was also brought up that the questions seem to be very gender and/or culturally specific.  I think they writers need to try harder to eliminate this bias.  Maybe there is no other way to do it and this is the best we will ever get, but I definitely believe something needs to be done to make it more valid in that we are measuring whether the required content is being learned and more reliable in that the answers will be the same across all cultures.