Standardized Testing

Standardized test has been the topic of a debate for over a decade now with parents getting concerned about their children. A standardized test is any form of test that requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or a selection of questions from common bank of questions, in the same way, and it is scored in a “standard” or consistent manner, which makes it possible to compare the relative performance of individual students or groups of students. It is also used to hold teachers accountable for the performance of the students. It is primarily associated with large-scale tests administered to large populations of students. This is often used in achievement tests, aptitude tests, college-admissions tests, international comparison tests,

There are certain qualities that standardized tests cannot measure, such as critical thinking, creativity, motivation,intricacy,lucidness.vivaciousness,fidelity,resilience, curiosity, persistence, reliability, endurance, self-discipline, courage, integrity etc. Standardized questions are general in nature and so the tests do not really assess skill. What standardized tests do is assess the general knowledge and understanding of students rather than their actual ability. Standardized testing often leads to a decrease in classroom time dedicated to teaching and learning more traditional subjects. The curriculum is drastically narrowed. Teachers often need to spend significant amounts of time preparing students to take the tests so they can do well, leaving less time to teach subjects that tests do not evaluate such as social studies. This result in “teaching to the test” which means that teachers are almost exclusively focused on helping students get good standardized test scores. It can place a huge amount of stress on students and teachers alike who are pressured in preparation and taking of the exams. Standardized testing only evaluates the individual performance of the student instead of the overall growth of that student over the course of the year. This does a disservice to both the teacher who worked hard to help their students grow and the student who worked extremely hard over the course of the year and improved tremendously but failed to score proficient. Many would argue that teacher and student performance should be evaluated on growth over the course of the year instead of one single test performance. They put forward this idea because educators or teachers cannot also update their instructional methods using the results because the questions on the test are general in nature, and it’s hard for teachers to know how to improve students’