Do standardized tests and grades accurately measure how well a subject is learned, or do students just cram their brains with what they are taught for the standardized tests? Covering a small sample of the topic is not necessarily learning it, but rather ingesting the information and regurgitating it for a test and then forgetting the information right afterwards. Different learning styles also come into play here and many instructors fail to teach in ways that all students may understand, leaving some students ill-prepared and with the possibility of testing poorly, or even failing. It seems that over time, the original concept of being in school to learn how to learn was lost, and the need to know how to be tested was found, resulting in lower test scores, less individual creativity, and the overall diminished desire for students to want to learn and attend school. …show more content…
The most common test distributed to students are multiple-choice tests. Students finish these tests more quickly, they are easier to grade, and the right answer is hidden somewhere in the four possible choices, but there seems to be a major flaw in this testing method. The education system appears to be teaching children how to ferret out answers rather than synthesize information and applying it to a real-world problem. Additionally, multiple-choice test answers throw off students when one answer is close to another, leaving students who even studied confused and unsure what to do. Discouraging creative thinking by administering multiple-choice tests affects how students learn and encourages guessing over inventiveness, not measuring how well a subject is