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Arguments Against Standardized Tests

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Standardized Tests Should one bad day affect how an individual’s life might turn out to be in the long run? Students are waiting eagerly for the dreadful moment the mailman arrives with their test results. An academic future is contrived through years of dedication and passionate motivation towards a successful life. For years the ACT’s have been sprouting many heated debates. Many began to question whether it was equitable to use the results of one test to define one’s whole academic ability throughout their school years. There are students all around the globe who have devoted their lives towards keeping up good grades and GPA’s, and some of them might not be the greatest test takers. The idea of recognizing how dependent colleges are …show more content…

On standardized exams, all test takers answer the same questions under the same conditions, initially in the multiple-choice format. Students are all put into one room and given a short amount of time where it is almost impossible to finish the test. The purpose of the Acts is to reward quick and correct answers to frivolous questions. According to the author of fairtest another reason why they cannot measure intellectual intelligence is that they do not measure the ability to think deeply or creatively in any field. “Their use encourages a narrowed curriculum, outdated methods of instruction, and harmful practices such as grade retention and tracking”(FairTest). If deep thought is not required then it cannot measure an individual’s knowledge. Tests should require some sort of work or set of steps to achieve …show more content…

Open-ended questions allow students to display knowledge and apply critical thinking skills, but most require human readers. in fact within the last 24 to 36 months the acts has been slowly increasing its level of difficulty. “If you compare some of the prior released ACT tests from 2005-2010 to ones from 2011-2014, the test is noticeably harder to finish, especially in Math, Reading, and Science” (Eufinger). He also states that many of the English questions such as the rhetorical skills questions have actually become less clear cut and more time consuming. These new alternations are actually affecting students unequally in a horrible

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Immigration is a controversial issue in developed countries. Especially in developed country Canada, one in five people in canada are foreign-born – one of the largest shares in the oecd.(OECD,2016). It is considered an important participant in the immigration market. Therefore, The main purpose of this report is to investigate to Canadian immigration policy, immigration factors and influence. Then the report comprises the investigation of the immigration history, social background and ethnic culture in recent years.

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Survival of the Sickest, by Dr. Sharon Moalem, is a book that reveals the origins of some modern diseases that beset us today. It explains how these sicknesses have been passed on for so many generations, and the impacts they have had on humanity, thus shedding a new light on them. By reading this book, much can be learned from the many different infections the author wrote about. However, hemochromatosis, diabetes, and progeria most exemplify how such terrible diseases worldwide could have provided evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. Hemochromatosis, an inherited disease, is a condition in which the body produces excess iron thinking there isn’t enough iron in the intestines, even though there is.

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1776 Words | 8 Pages

Standardized Testing: Making College Admissions “Fair” Every year , the daunting prospect of undergoing standardized testing brings anxiety to thousands of high school students, and for good reason: a student’s performance on standardized college admission exams - most importantly, the ACT and SAT - is a major determinant in deciding where they will go to college. For decades, such standardized tests have been universally accepted as part of the admissions process: proponents argue, as Syverson (2007) explains, that such tests are the only way of standardizing college admissions when students from different schools have such widely varying profiles. However, in the past several decades a growing anti-testing movement has begun to poke holes

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1749 Words | 7 Pages

Introduction Standardized tests may be used for a wide variety of educational purposes. For example, they may be used to determine a young child’s readiness for kindergarten, identify students who need special-education services or specialized academic support, place students in different academic programs or course levels, or award diplomas and other educational certificates. Thesis Statement Standardized tests should not be eliminated completely, but should rather be evaluated in addition to other factors such as grades, extracurricular activities, and volunteer hours. This would take pressure off of students during standardized tests, allow colleges to see how well-rounded the students are, and give students who are better in other areas

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894 Words | 4 Pages

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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1129 Words | 5 Pages

A major factor in a student’s future is his or hers ability to perform well on arbitrary standardized tests. This is the “tree” they must climb in order to achieve future success. Although standardized tests like the SAT have been a way of gauging a student’s ability to learn and retain information for years, they are an inaccurate measurement. Being created over 100 years ago, reconsidering the policy of issuing the SATs is crucial.

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1602 Words | 7 Pages

Some studies show that wealthier students that score high on the tests have taken numerous prep classes and even had private tutors come in and help them prepare for these tests, which cost hundreds of dollars, and lower-class students cannot afford them which puts them at a disadvantage no matter how smart they may be.(Soares and Ovaska). Soares ' research has found that tests like the ACTs and SATs put low-income and minority students at significant disadvantages and have resulted in a lack of diversity at the nation 's four-year colleges, including public universities in the University of North Carolina system. He thinks high school grade point averages (GPA) would give admissions counselors a better grasp of a student 's abilities without the gender and racial biases that test scores carry. Soares shared his thoughts recently with N.C. Policy Watch, and told us why he thinks North Carolina 's public university system should turn its back on the ACTs and

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467 Words | 2 Pages

Standardized Testing You are sitting in the classroom and the teacher says you have a test tomorrow, and suddenly you freeze up, sweat starts coming down your face you get that feeling of anxiety in your chest. Standardized Testing has been around for about 50 years now but recently they have became more pressure- packed and ubiquitous on teens. Many individuals feel as tho Standardized Testing such as the SATs, ACTs,Eogs, and Eocs do not measure their true intelligence it is indeed a waste of time and payment. People feel as tho these test are never based upon anything they know and that it is rigged so that they can not succeed.

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895 Words | 4 Pages

Standardized tests are very common in today’s modern society. They are used as a tool to measure a person’s performance and indicate how their estimated performance will be in a college class. Every year hundreds of students take the ACT or SAT in order to get accepted into their college of choice and to receive scholarships, but they fail to see the problems with these standardized tests. As more and more people take these tests, the national average score falls causing doubt in the extremely important system. This is leading people to question whether or not the ACT and SATs are accomplishing what they were created to do.

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647 Words | 3 Pages

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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1024 Words | 5 Pages

The stakes are higher for these two individual cases alone. Standardized graduation test also lead to higher dropout rates, and this is certainly not the goal of any hardworking student or parent. The ACT is a prime example of high-stake testing in the U.S. standardized test culture. In the survey of colleges the ACT score of an individual student was ranked as the second most important thing colleges looked at following grades. This shows that the vast future of any individual ranging from those who don't test well, to those not able to afford higher preparation rely on one miniscule test to define their opportunities in life.

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1859 Words | 8 Pages

The Controversy of Standardized Testing Students everywhere take standardized tests. However, are they truly beneficial to the students? Are these tests capable of showing what students can really do? Or, are they biased against the test-taker, making it harder to reach his or her goals? Is it fair to base a student’s intelligence on one simple test grade that that student might have had a disadvantage in?

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1309 Words | 6 Pages

Have you ever thought of what our education system would be like without standardized testing? Henry Chuancy and Wilbur Bender invented standardized testing, the SAT specifically, in order to identify the gifted and talented students (Tozer, 2002, p.231). The Early Cold War had just begun and The United States believed the key to winning it was detecting the gifted and talented students and grouping them so they could excel above the rest (Tozer, 2002, p.231). In this paper, I will argue that standardized testing is needed in our education system. As stressful as standardized testing can be, I believe it is a crucial part of today’s education system and allows students to be measured by intelligence.

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980 Words | 4 Pages

These factors demonstrate that this source of testing is not an accurate representation of a student’s intellectual ability; therefore, students pursuit for higher education should not be dictated by one test. Ultimately, standardized tests, such as the ACT, should not control a student’s ability to pursue higher education. Even though institutions view these test scores to decide a student’s eligibility, the ACT does not determine how a student will succeed in a college or university. Nevertheless, while students are required to take these test to graduate high school, institutions should consider more than test scores and not let the ACT be the determining factor in a student’s true ability.

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1191 Words | 5 Pages

These tests promised a way to identify kids who could go further in their education, while separating them from the kids who learned slower and would need extra help. The tests also came with the notion of academic tracking in order to steer students onto a career path deemed appropriate for them (Gershon, 2015). Attempting to measure a student’s intelligence through a standardized test is beyond absurd. All students learn at a different pace. This means that, even if a student may not know a skill at the time of the test, it doesn’t mean that they will never know it.

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