Samuel Gomes
Mrs Gusse
Persuasive Essay
April 14, 2023
The Testing Stress
Testing can cause more hurt than benefits to a student. Everyone has their own way of learning, and having students take mandatory tests isn't the best way to test students' understanding. This sort of schooling is an unfair way of judging and understanding someone's knowledge. Tests can cause unnecessary stress on students, along with not giving a good picture of what a student is learning in their classes. Scoring low on one of these tests can also cause many problems involving students' mental health and their wellbeing, as the student may feel as if they are less equipped to take on educational challenges.
Brain Galla, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, found that high school grades are actually more predictive of college graduation than standardized tests like the SAT or ACT (Tereda, 2022). Other researchers have found that standardized tests like the ones most high schools hand out have their flaws. Teachers may say “We need these test results so we can see what you’ve learned” but how many students are really showing all of their knowledge? These tests can only hold so much knowledge and information. What about
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Using tests causes students to be put under a lot of stress but, all of this could be avoided if we could take a step back and revise how our schooling system functions. Testing not only causes stress but can mess with a students mental and physical health. Not only that but testing doesn’t even give a good picture of what the student is learning, so all of the stress and anxiety is built up for teachers to not get an accurate result. I’ll finish with a quote by Diane Ravitch, a historian from Houston who says “Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.”