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Arguments Against Standardized Testing

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Why Standardized Testing is not an Accurate Depiction of Intelligence
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines standardized testing as a test of intelligence whose reliability has been established by obtaining an average score of a significantly large number of individuals for use as a standard of comparison (Merriam-Webster). This means that it is a test used for to determine someone’s intelligence by comparing scores to an average obtained from a large population. Currently, sixty percent of colleges say that test scores are an important factor in student admissions (Morse). Standardized tests are traditionally multiple-choice but can also have true-false, short-answer, and essay questions. When people hear “standardized test” they tend to immediately …show more content…

This is one of the issues of standardized testing. Every standardized test is written and evaluated the same way. Some students are simply more apt for testing; this factor can make it hard for educators to get a true evaluation of a student’s abilities (Bhattacharyya). Most schools apply standardized tests to evaluate whether a student should be in special placement programs. Every student learns differently than the other students in their grade level. Capable students may do poorly on tests, causing them to blame themselves and their teachers. Standardized testing is insensitive to an individual student's learning style (Bhattacharyya). For example, some students are visual learners, meaning they learn by seeing things, while others are auditory learners, meaning they learn by hearing things, and yet others are tactile learners, meaning that they learn by doing (“Standardized”). For some students, it can be hard for them to express their answers on paper and would much rather say their answers out loud. There can be instances where students are not placed in special placement at all, or they are wrongly placed. A student could have above average intelligence but be a poor test-taker or a student could be an excellent test-taker but struggle in school. Poor scores can stigmatize capable students for the rest of their academic lives as well as their teachers for their “poor” scores

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Should Standardized Testing Be Required

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Standardized tests are one of the most popular ways schools attempt to evaluate academic intelligence of students, school districts, and teachers. These tests are used more specifically to evaluate student performance in the education system by testing their abilities in mathematics, english and sciences. By giving every student the same test, they are setting a standard idea for how well every student should score on the test, such as the SAT or the ACT, no matter the school or educational process they are receiving. Allowing every student to take the exact same test, gives the state a way to generalize student’s academic intelligence without having to do much work to make the testing one hundred percent fair. Standardized testing in schools should no longer be required because it discriminates against the less wealthy families, does not effectively measure achievement and becomes a distraction to the student’s learning environment.

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Standardized Testing Essay

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It creates an obsession with test scores as a chief “accountably” metric for students, educators and schools. This system has led to the exams becoming an end instead of a means to an end. For instance, according the Joh Holt, within the learning environment “the air practically vibrates with suspicion and anxiety, the child learns to live in a daze, saving his energies for those small parts of his life that are too trivial for the adults to bother with, and thus remain his.” (E) This represents the crucial and harsh environment students experience when facing tests. It puts unnecessary stress on the minds of students and degrades their self worth into nothing.

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Arguments Against Standardized Testing

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More often than not, children who fail these tests can not afford necessary materials to be able to get a quality educations. Like Kohn said, “guess who can afford better test preparation” (Kohn 601), just like poor families, there are poorly funded schools that also can not afford to give the students the education they need. These are obstacles that are frequently looked over by college admission counselors. “ The more that poor children fill in worksheets (in an effort to raise their test scores) the further they fall behind affluent kids who are more likely to get lessons that help them understand ideas” (Kohn 601). Even if there is a good effort to get these students prepared for the tests, it results in being behind on their schoolwork.

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Standardized Testing Persuasive Essay

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In fact, the increasing use of standardized testing will do more damage than good, because of its failure to capture the entirety of a student’s body of work. Furthermore, the overwhelming stress that the United States government, and school systems have placed on the usage of standardized tests has become detrimental to American education, and is not the most effective way to gauge the intelligence of American students. The American educational system should be fixated on providing each child enough attention and information so they can succeed in that class and in the future. However, the increasing focus on having to pass a standardized test has blinded schools of the real goal, because they are required to get their students to pass the standardized tests.

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Arguments Against Standardized Testing

1604 Words | 7 Pages

The opportunity to learn is not given equally, and standardized test, including the SAT, reflects this. If one believes that opportunities are given equally to all and scores differ still, then it leaves room for discriminate against certain underperforming groups, labeling them as "not as intelligent" as others. Standardized testing uses other than college admissions include to advance grade levels, to evaluate schools, or to evaluate teachers. Although standardized tests have many uses in various fields, they all still have the same issues with bias. William G. Cunningham and Tiffany D. Sanzo comment, “All students cannot be held to the same standards unless programs and initiatives are developed to level the playing field.

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Arguments Against Standardized Testing

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The article “Standardized Testing: Harmful to Educational Health” written by Monty D. Neil, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, and Medina J. Noe, a consultant for Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color, explains that standardized tests “assume that all individuals perceive information and solve problems the same way” (Neil and Noe 692). Not every student processes information the same way, which limits the effectiveness of standardized testing. When the test is only created to be beneficial to one kind of student, it marginalizes everyone else. Just because a student does not perform well on a test that is not made for the way they think, it does not mean they are any less intelligent. It only means that they do not process information in the same way as another student that scored higher on the same test.

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Arguments Against Standardized Testing

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“Daniel Kortez puts it, scores on a Standardized Test “usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement. ”(Harris). Teachers fail to teach the material that students need to know to do well, leading to inaccurate test scores. In schools, students were reportedly “superficially engaged if they just copied down answers, guessed a lot, and skipped the hard parts.” (Harris).

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Arguments Against Standardized Testing

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A student is defined as so much more than their test scores. Standardized tests cannot measure a student's aptitudes that set them apart from

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Controversy Of Standardized Testing

1859 Words | 8 Pages

In America, this happens every day. Although many people believe standardized testing is a justified way of measuring intelligence and grading students, a growing number of people in America feel that standardized test taking is biased, inaccurate, and an ineffective way of measuring student intelligence. Some parents

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Arguments Against Standardized Testing

1485 Words | 6 Pages

Many years ago, tests were given to place students into classes and determine students who needed additional help. Today, tests are used to judge the success or failure of students’ teachers and schools (Kohn, 2000). According to a new study from MIT neuroscientists working with education researchers at Harvard University and Brown University ‘Tests are designed to measure the knowledge and skills that students have acquired in school students who have the highest gains on test scores do not exhibit the ability to analyse abstract problems and think logically ‘. This just shows that the students who excel on such test do not need to be intelligent. Standardized tests tend to measure the temporary acquisition of facts and skills, including the skill of test-taking itself, more than genuine understanding but rather; evaluate how fast a student can answer questions correctly (Kohn, 2000).

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Arguments Against Standardized Testing

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In general, it is a common misconception that students who do not perform well on tests are less capable than their counterparts. The

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Standardized Testing Argumentative Essay

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First of all, standardized testing doesn’t measure a student's intelligence at all. Although, they can measure the amount of answers that students memorize. “Standardized achievement tests will always contain many items that are not aligned with what’s emphasized instructionally in a particular setting.” In addition to this, one article explains that the questions on the test are answered correctly by only half the students. “The proportion of topics presented on a standardized test that received more than cursory treatment in each textbook was never higher than 50 percent.”

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Standardized Testing In Public Schools

1191 Words | 5 Pages

Standardized testing has become one of the most popular types of testing in U.S. public schools to date. Students take numerous standardized tests throughout their childhood schooling. (Studies show that a typical student takes an average of 112 mandated standardized tests between Pre-K and 12th grade.) While standardized testing is one of the main procedures that Universities use to judge incoming students, it is not proven to be the most effective way to convey a student’s actual intelligence level. The U.S. should not focus so heavily on standardized testing because it is not a complete accurate measurement of a student’s intelligence.

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