It is discouraging to think that the intent of standardized testing was to promote educational excellence, while the introduction of standardized testing to students has actually had the opposite effect. How do you define student achievement? Many people think standardized testing is the answer. These exams are otherwise known as “high-stakes tests” because the outcome of these tests are often extremely significant for a student’s future. Since 1994, when states were first required to develop their own tests, standardized testing has been used to measure the performance of students. But, using standardized testing to do so is taking away from education. Education should serve a specific purpose, to have students learn and explore what life has to offer. However, standardized …show more content…
At the start of the school year in 2012, public schools in Virginia and Washington D.C. announced how many students would have to pass that year’s test in each racial group for the schools to remain with a good rating, “For example, in Virginia only 45% of black students in each school must pass standardized math tests while 68% of whites, and 82% of Asians must do the same” (Why It’s Time to Get Rid of Standardized Tests). These schools are setting different academic bars for each race to compete with. While the officials say that those plans were not discriminatory, what these schools do not realize is that if some students are expected to achieve less than others, it will lower the academic expectations for those students, further widening the gap in education. As well as racial bias in standardized testing, there is also a language barrier between students. If two students are taken from the same classroom, one may have been speaking English since they were a toddler, while the other may have just recently moved to America. Not knowing a lot of the English language, students with English as their