Standardized Testing Argumentative Essay

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For a very long time, schools have been using standardized testing to measure the progress of students inside the classroom. This is a simple way for schools to understand the quality of the teaching and learning going on. However, standardized tests tend to be inaccurate due to how little information they can actually gather about a student. The tests don't even take into account the teaching style that the teacher used or how the student learns because the tests are all the same to make it "fair". While fairness plays a big role when it comes to education, the way that standardized testing makes things fair can actually negatively affect a student's test score.
Standardized tests are a very biased way of determining how well a teacher is doing their job or how seriously a child is taking their learning. Teachers may have a different way of teaching their class the curriculum than is considered the "standard" way of doing it. This could be because their class …show more content…

There are so many aspects of a student's mind that cannot be taken into account while they are taking a test that can only assess so much. During a standardized test, students are immune from showing their critical thinking skills, reliability, resilience, leadership skills, and creativity. These are all skills that are crucial to the learning process, so it makes no sense why they shouldn't be able to use them while showing what they know during a test. In an article on standardized testing by Philip Harris, it is said that "By ignoring attributes that they can't properly assess, standardized tests inadvertently create incentives for students to become superficial thinkers—to seek the quick, easy, and obvious answer." Not taking into consideration the other skills that a child may have other than how good they are at math or science is seriously harming how they score on these