No one ever said school was easy. It takes quite a bit of hard work and preparation from both the students and teachers. All within a school year there are different homework, assignments, projects, tests, quizzes, presentations and much more to try and fit into an already busy course schedule. To add to that the Education Reform Law of 1993 was introduced to schools, which required that all public school students have to be tested in the subjects of English Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science and Technology Engineering. Those set of tests are called Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and they are meant to measure students performance based on the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework.
After reading the first chapter of Freakonomics, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, I realized not only what similarities sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common, but also to what lengths they will go to receive an incentive and/or achieve their goals. It details how some teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat for their advantages. In the beginning of the chapter the authors describe the concept of incentives, initially when I began reading I thought to my self “isn’t this chapter about sumo wrestlers and teachers?” Even though it is, the authors decided to take explain some terms and back-story before diving into what they wanted to get across, which in my opinion was executed beautifully.
Rounds and rounds of testing, nothing else to do but study for tests. Tests that will decide your future, nothing will change the decision that will be made, a chance that takes you months of preparation and hard work. A road block of four hours of testing. The chances of you failing are very high, all that pressure, and then few months of waiting, if you fail, that’s it, everything is gone, you future is swallowed by a dark storm that has consumed your delusion. Standardized tests are overused in our society and don’t provide an accurate picture of student progress.
Austin Bullington, a student who is severely dyslexic and mildly dysgraphic, tells the story of how a single standardized test had the ability to derail his dreams. In an interview, Austin stated that his aspiration has always been to teach music, but before he could take the classes he needed to earn his degree, he had to pass a standardized test for teaching; a test that was supposed to indicate his ability to perform in college. Austin graduated high school with a 3.72 GPA and was in the top twenty-five percent of his class. He was even doing very well in college, too, but this single score did not allow him to pursue the career he had always wanted (Bullington). The standardized test was supposed to measure Austin’s aptitude to perform
Pansy Harris Mrs. Shephard English IV 20 February 2018 Students Are Just a Standardized Test Score What if getting into college was not based on a state test score defining how good you did on it? Students all around are being defined as a person on how well they did on the SAT/ACT and how high their GPA was in high school. Standardized tests shouldn’t define you because maybe you are not a test taker, not everyone is good at academics, and maybe you were stressed out over these state tests because you know you would be defined on your test results.
Standardized tests have become of overwhelming importance, especially for high school students hoping to pursue a college degree. These tests have invaded the minds of students and educators alike producing feelings of frustration and stress. Educators become hyper-focused on specific standards and worry about whether their students are testing well throughout the year as these tests may reflect SAT or ACT success. Instead of focusing on ideas and learning that would be of more value to the students and their future, students are stressing over testing at all levels in order to score well on these college predicting tests.
It is the summer of 1959, Ted McCarrel and E. F. Lindquist created the American College Testing (ACT) program. It was a solution to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The SAT was used by more selective schools during the early 1900s. McCarrel and Lindquist created a test that would allow usage for admissions, placement, and academic preparation(erikthered). These tests have been in existence for quite some time and the tests have only been increasing in difficulty with every few years.
Although the ultimate debate about Standardized Testing is on how the tests are used, whether they present reliable or unreliable evaluations of student learning, the public has many more question(Concepts). Are Standardized Tests fair to all students? Do the benefits outweigh the costs? While some experts, one being Latasha Gandy, Minnesota Program Director for Students for Education Reform, believes that Standardized tests are good for children, families and schools. Other experts, including those at FairTest, believe that standardized testing damages education.
A standardized test is a large scale exam technique that schools administer to a large population of their students (PENRC, 2016). This type of exam provides a standard assessment for all students, and its purpose is to measure their academic achievement. The standardized test is scored using a standard grading rubric or a guideline with a set of passing score that decides what grade/performance is considered to be proficient (PENRC, 2016). With this classification technique, it is possible to compare all individual scores, so that the each student can be ranked based on their percentile.
Did you know that standardize testing can help students achieve their goals? Standardized Testing comes during school and it helps your teachers see what level you are on, for example these are the test they give you in school PARCC, I-ready, and EOC, But in my opinion I know that testing can be good for students. Standardize test are reliable and measure the objective of students achievements. Standardize tests are inclusive and non-discriminatory because they ensure content is equivalent for all students. Therefore I believe that standardized testing is good.
Another problem with standardized testing is that if a question is answered correctly by a vast majority (eighty percent or more) of people taking the test, that question is often eliminated from the test. These tests are meant to show “comparative interpretations” so important questions that many teachers may focus on extensively are often taken out because too many students are getting them right. As James Popham, UCLA professor, puts it, “the better the job that teachers do in teaching important knowledge and/or skills, the less likely it is that there will be items on a standardized achievement test measuring such knowledge and/or skills,” which does not make sense in testing academic achievement. So, although teachers on a large scale deem a subject very important and teach as it is so, the subjects value is diminished for testing purposes (Popham). Jesse Hagopian, author of More than a Score, calls the power of
According to a study by the council of the Great City Schools, students spend 20 to 25 hours a year taking standardized tests. . Many tests are implemented by federal, state, and local levels. Standardized tests put too much pressure on students worldwide. Students everyday go to school stressed because of the amount of tests they are required to take. Some classmates everyday tend to learn slower than other students.
“He won’t graduate” they say (Harris). The shaky hands, red faces, and biting of the pencils have become more frequent now for students as the curriculum gets more difficult and the pressure only increases for students to succeed. We have all been a victim of standardized tests not only students, but teachers. Sitting in a room for more than an hour while filling in a bubble of an educated guess is nothing compared to the interaction in the classroom (Miner). The use of standardized testing is not improving education in America, but rather degrading it through the unsatisfactory use of rank, poor evaluation, and the lack of real world situations.
Every year towards the end of the school year students start taking numerous standardized test that the state requires they take. The state of Minnesota should not have schools administrate standardized test because of the negative effect on curriculum, not taking different types of circumstances in consideration from the student’s performance, and expense for the test taking away from other resources. Each grade level, starting in third grade all the way through a senior in high school, will have one stressful day of testing on the material that their teachers have been teaching them from the beginning of the school year. Each year teachers teach around a curriculum based on what the standardized test will cover and not on what will help the
Students studying at 1:00am, teachers frantically creating review sheets, all this mental strain just to see a deficient score on a test. This is happening to students all over the country. They are constantly manipulated that doing well on the PSAT is nearly as important as living. Teachers begin to believe preparing students for the upcoming AP Biology Exam is the main focus for the class, and rightfully so. With the influence that standardized tests have on students, why should a teacher be concerned with teaching anything else?
