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Against Standardized Testing Essay

1316 Words6 Pages

Standardized testing has proved to be the enemy of creativity. Each school year since the induction of “No Child left Behind”, our children are being conditioned to learn the content of these test. These test are the measure, to which a child's intelligence or lack thereof is assessed. Teachers are being forced to “teach to test”, and discouraged from veering from the approved curriculum. This evolves solely around the information presented on these test. This kind of system dampens the spirit and creativity of growing minds. So much attention to specific information, leaves little room for other interest. Standardized test are not an efficient way to gauge a child’s intelligence. So many other factors that are a part of a healthy growth cycle, …show more content…

What are the effects of grooming our children to take test but not express them self creatively? As parents, we have a personal stake in this education process. Children can be really competitive in a lot of things including academics. Each school year since the induction of “No a Child a Left a Behind” a big deal is made about the public release of test scores. A school’s success or failure, is based almost solely on these scores. “One of the major drawbacks of this legislation is that NCLB penalizes districts that have many minority or disadvantaged students.” (Longo, n.d., p.54.)Does this erase the self-loathing, marked disappointment, or the need for reassurance of self that students at underachieving schools demonstrate? The answer is no, and all of these feelings are rooted in a test score. Each school year our children’s progress is determined by how well they perform on these test. They learn content not creativity, this is what our teachers are forced to teach. Good test scores generate revenue for the school but can take away from a child’s individual self-worth. They feel they are only as good as their score. i.e. novice, proficient, distinguished. The encouragement of free and critical thinking is discouraged. Standardized tests contradict creativity on every

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Using standardized testing as the basis for assessing a student’s learning can be extremely damaging on a child’s success in school. Standardized testing does nothing to assess the skills that will be useful in the later stages of a child’s life including creativity, learning capabilities, social skills, group work, and thinking skills (https://www.oxfordlearning.com/pros-cons-of-standardized-tests/ ). This is because the vast majority of standardized testing evaluates a student’s ability to memorize as much information as possible, write all of it down on the test day, and immediately forget it afterwards. Instead of this, teachers and school board directors should choose activities and projects that assess important life skills as a final grade. This could be solved through the use of spoken interviews between the student and teacher or the student and the class, the use of group projects, and as a more reasonable solution, the use of a loosely framed free response test.

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