Standardized Testing Essay

Recently, the discussion of standardized testing and its importance has become much more frequent. Standardized tests are tests that are given to a large number of people with the same questions and are graded the same way such as the SAT or ACT. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, all universities required some form of standardized test to get in, but since then most universities give the option to submit a score and some will not even accept them. The current debate now is whether or not standardized testing is the best way to analyze the skills of a specific individual. Standardized testing is being used to measure many different things. Standardized testing can be used for evaluating education programs. Another way that it is used is to evaluate

Not only do standardized tests evaluate how well someone can take a test and not the knowledge they know but also can be racist and sexist. Young Whan Choi author of How to Address Racial Bias in Standardized Testing and educator helps argue this point by saying, “Too often, test designers rely on questions which assume background knowledge more often held by White, middle-class students. It’s not just that the designers have unconscious racial bias; the standardized testing industry depends on these kinds of biased questions in order to create a wide range of scores.” To continue, standardized tests also don’t accurately evaluate education programs because standardized tests only test on English, math, and science, not any of the other things students might be learning. Valerie Strauss, a reporter, and author for the Washington Post supports this in her article What you need to know about standardized testing, “[Lamar Alexander] found that the NCLB mandate for schools to give high-stakes annual standardized tests in math and English language arts led to reduced time — or outright elimination — of classes in science, social studies, the arts, and other subjects.” We shouldn’t base students' knowledge on things that they may not know due to the different cultures that they grew up in. There are other ways that can measure students' knowledge that do a better job of getting a

One of the authors of Research Finds that High School GPAs Are Stronger Predictors of College Graduation than ACT Scores, Elaine M. Allensworth, Lewis-Sebring Director of the University of Chicago Consortium, states, “GPAs measure a very wide variety of skills and behaviors that are needed for success in college, where students will encounter widely varying content and expectations. In contrast, standardized tests measure only a small set of the skills that students need to succeed in college, and students can prepare for these tests in narrow ways that may not translate into better preparation to succeed in college.” GPAs give a better perspective into who the students are as a person and not solely on their skill in taking specific tests. We could also start using portfolio assessments instead of standardized tests. Portfolio assessments are an accumulation of a student's work over time instead of analyzing their knowledge based on tests with only one answer. Starr Sackstein secondary educator and school leader in New York and author of Instead of Standardized Testing, Consider Portfolio Assessment states, “If we truly want to know what students know and can do, we should have a universal portfolio system that allows students to gather evidence of learning over time. This can be done on a national and state level, and educators at every level should be included in the process to develop the success criteria and skill set