Standardized Test Pros And Cons

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,

They are effective in holding teachers and schools accountable for student achievement. They can be and are used to make sure teachers are aware of what their students need to know and are helping them achieve success. Test scores are public record and therefore help schools remain accountable for student achievement and success. Because the tests are always the same, administered the same way and scored the same way, they are almost perfectly objective. Imagine that you are teaching a lesson and want to know how effective your teaching is. The most natural way to measure this would be to administer a test to gauge student learning. If your students perform well, you know you are teaching effectively. If they perform poorly, you might need to re-evaluate some of your methods. Standardized tests are also so named because, no matter which school or classroom you are in, the testing process is identical. This presents another positive aspect of standardized testing: the ability to compare student achievement between schools and across city, county, and state lines. Using standardized tests, you can see how a student in the Dubai is performing compared to a student in New Abu Dhabi. This ability to compare student achievement can help ensure that students all across the country are achieving at the highest level. In doing so, we are able to

This can also indicate how your local area is doing compared against the national landscape. The students’ progress can be tracked over the years. When students take the same type of test yearly (adjusted for grade level) it is easy to see if a student is improving, losing ground academically, or staying about the same. (For example, if a child is taking a norm-referenced test and scores in the 75th percentile in the sixth grade and the 80th percentile in the seventh grade, you can see that the child is gaining ground in school.) This helps determine how a child is doing academically. On the other hand, the opponents of this idea believe that standardized test is inadequate as an educational evaluation tool. They maintain that the multiple-choice format that is used on standardized testing is seen as an insufficient tool for assessment, and instead, encourages a simplistic way of thinking, where there are only correct and wrong answers that do not seem to be applicable in real-world situations. Also, such a format is biased towards male students, who are found to adapt more easily to the game-like point scoring of multiple-choice questions. They put forward this argument also because they assert that standardized testing can be wrongfully used as a center of debate to fuel political agendas. This is a sad reality far too often