Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing-Exit Exams

Standardized Testing-Exit Exams Being an average student in high school, they have to take unit test pretty much every 3 weeks. Many of those students overall do extremely well. So why is it that they still have to take standardized exit exams in order to graduate? Why should a teens whole high school experience be defined by one test? The school system has been doing this for years and each year the number of students that pass goes down. It will continue to fail if standardized test remains mandatory for graduation of its students. Over time standardized test have been used to test an individual’s skills and test the basic knowledge they have obtained. This isn’t always a good thing because “researcher have consistently found that an approach based on extrinsic rewards and consequences really reduces children’s intrinsic motivation to learn” (Solley 4). When students aren’t motivated to learn, they don’t perform as well and eventually begin to fail their classes.

Working hard to pass a class and get a good GPA can be meaningless if the exit exams aren’t passed. The teachers get a study guide that they share with their students and instead of learning the material they are more concerned with memorizing what will be on the exit exam. Knowing that this could possibly stop them from graduating “they naturally resort to doing the things that will earn the swiftest reward…higher test scores” (Solley 5). So in other words they are exclusively focused on the test itself and not the actual material. With students being only focused on what will be on the exam, their knowledge has begun to become narrow to things in the real world. They won’t learn as much as they use to because if it’s not on the test, it’s not important enough to