I am a highschool student who is being forced to complete the Literature Keystone lest I don't graduate. This on its own is ridiculous, but the more ridiculous thing is the exam itself. I finished the first half of the exam within the first thirty minutes I was handed it. I was fully confident on all of my multuple choice answers and had a full paragraph full of evidence for each short answer question. I thought I would be able to take the second half but unfortunately for me and my peers, finishing your work in a reasonable timeframe is not something those in charge want. I had to sit for an hour and a half in silence, an hour and a half that would have been better spent on actually working on my exam, not that I would have needed that much time in the first place considering the exam could be aced by a monkey with a blindfold on being handed a pencil and told to scribble. This test is nothing but a way to "assess" us and see just how "stupid" everyone in this state's schools are. 

So the state gets the arbitrary grade and sees how bad the grades are and nothing changes. So what is the point? I don't have an answer and I don't think a satisfactory answer even exists. 

The Keystone Exam only serves to make people feel worse about themselves. I know genuinely talented people who bomb these exams and how bad it makes them feel. Those people have a future doing something meaningful, their passion, and all this is doing is killing their confidence.

So taking the Keystone Exam itself is a bloated process, the test is arbitrary and gets no real valuable results, and it only serves to put talented people who might just not be good test-takers down. What are the benefits!?