Arguments Against Standardized Testing

The SAT is a standardized test in which almost every high school student is imposed to take in order to even be considered for a competitive college. Is it justified for a student’s potential future to be dictated by an arbitrary score? Just how much pressure is enough to push a young adolescent student into the brink of stress to cause inner turmoil? For some schools, these standardized tests are demanded on these students simply for the sake of funding. While students are taking more and more tests, standardized testing will generate more stress and anxiety for students while lowering the quality of education. Some individuals are led to believe that standardized testing should be kept in schools because they’re reliable in evaluating the

Particularly, students are not able to properly foster their potential and are unable to exhibit beyond the scope of the test. For example, “this test-generated binary is troubling because it gives no space to the full range of features that comprise effective reading and writing” (“How Standardized Tests Shape” 2). Students that have abilities and skills that stretch above the tested requirements are unable to showcase them and distinguish themselves. These tests narrow down the material for students which results in neglect of the capabilities of students. These outstanding students are left disengaged by a school curriculum that devotes its’ time to teach how to take a test. Daniel Koretz, a psychometrician, states that standardized tests do not offer a “direct and complete measure of educational achievement” and continues by stating that the tests “can measure only a portion of the goals of education” (Kortez). These tests contain too few items to be acknowledged as a necessary tool to evaluate educational achievement. There is a vast amount of knowledge and material that a standardized test cannot cover such as critical thinking and creative analytical problem-solving. There’s no reward for such skill and finesse in the level of standardized testing. In fact,

The argument is that standardized testing is objective and presumably an unbiased method to evaluate students because of its “objectivity”. Alfie Kohn’s book The Case Against Standardized Testing, refers to the objectivity of standardized testing as “‘objective’ in the sense that it's scored by machines, but people wrote the questions (which may be biased) … and people decided to include them on the exam”. Standardized tests are objective only because they’re multiple-choice and have one correct answer. There is little to no error involved in the grading process of these standardized tests. The content of the tests; however, is another subject of objectivity. Kohn makes a valid point in stating that the question was written by a person and was chosen to be included in the standardized test by a person. There is an inherent presence of bias embedded in human choice. Ultimately, this sense of objectivity derived from standardized testing is a product and dependent of subjectivity in the unconscious beliefs and values of different