Standardized testing is a way to test students’ knowledge of the class material over the course of the class time, or so it is believed. According to “procon.org,” standardized testing has been around since the mid-1800s (1). A standardized test can be defined as any test that has the same questions for all those taking it, and is scored consistently (Standardized Test, 1). Many tests can be considered “standardized,” by that definition, although the words “standardized test” is typically associated with larger tests (Standardized Test, 1). A few types of common standardized tests that many people have heard of classify under the following: Achievement tests, aptitude tests, college-admissions tests, international-comparison tests, and psychological tests (Standardized Test, 1). But the tests I would like to focus on are the achievement tests that every student dreads taking after the end of a class. These standardized tests should not be allowed because they do not accurately show what a student has learned, they cause teachers to teach the students the tests, not the information, and they have not …show more content…
Some schools will spend as much as a quarter of the class time “teaching the test,” instead of the curriculum (Is the Use of Standardized Tests Improving Education in America?, 1). All this does for the students is force them to lose instructional time, and cram during the time they do have at the beginning of the class time. This also leads back to my first point with the fact that they are not accurate. Because the students have had class time taken from them, the tests cannot test the information they learned because they had a short amount of time to learn a lot of information. Not only this, but standardized tests have not improved the student achievement since they have been