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.
Standardized testing not only stresses out students, but it also leads the teachers to go in a dilemma whether to focus on the curriculum or to get students ready for the standardized testing. No one has ever enjoyed taking a test in his or her entire educational history. Similarly Mr. Estrada’s 4th grade class was not every excited about taking standardized test. Each student has his or her own level of learning. As the students were taking the test, I noticed some students were panicking, while others were confused.
Since 2006, overall SAT scores have dropped by 21 points. It is safe to say that the increase in standardized testing has done more bad than good. When standardized testing became more prominent, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) saw a plateau in reading and math scores. Additionally, the NAEP saw no further closure in the test score gap. The test score gap affects all minorities.
One of the biggest flaws is standardized testing has not improved student achievement. " Despite using them for several decades, policymakers and educators do not yet know how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement and to improve education." So if these tests aren’t improving our students, then why do we have them? I believe we need to change the tests or improve them somehow so that we do see some sort of improvement. Tests are very crucial to education because they show what a student knows, if we took these tests out completely then we would have no idea if students are improving or declining.
The facts supporting this include : teachers teaching to the test, the amount of stress put on the students and staff, student performance, and impersonal testing. To begin with, standardized testing causes teachers to “ teach to the test”. Many teachers across the US feel the need for their students to succeed on standardized
The Standardized test, similar to the STAAR, can be a nightmare for some students. It should not be allowed in Texas due to many reasons such as wasting precious education time, not promoting students to the next grade, causing stress, provoking students to take drugs, and not determining students’ full potential. Standardized tests should not continue because they provide inaccurate feedback about students and destroy their confidence for their future education and life. Although the standardized test shows if the student should get promoted or not, the test lacks showing the full potential of some students because it judges a student based on a few skills. For example, if a student is good in classwork but is a bad test taker,
Imagine working hard all year long maintaining excellent grades and then boom you bomb a standardized test. Could it be that you didn’t retain any of the information that you were taught all year long or is it because you are just horrible at taking a test. Either way, it is very difficult and unfair for the State of Texas to base everything on one test. How can one test determine what you have learned all year? This is the question that many parents’ year after year ask themselves after receiving their children’s test results.
Mrs. Smith has been a very dedicated English teacher at Longview High School for years. She spends hours planning lessons and grading papers and does not mind using some of her off hours and free time to focus on her work, but with budget cuts and increasing student populations the work load is getting to become too cumbersome. Mrs. Smith is spending more and more of her own, unpaid time grading papers and the return time on papers can be up to three weeks. After discussing this issue with the rest of the English department, who voiced similar concerns, Mrs. Smith and her fellow teachers took this matter to the principal Ms. Rosenberg. The teachers suggested an up-and-coming technology, an automated essay grader, to assist in the process of
People argue that standardized testing detracts from genuine learning and that the emphasis on test scores results in an overly narrow focus on math and reading, neglecting other crucial areas of education, such as social studies, science, and the arts. While it is true that some educators may prioritize teaching according to the test, this is not a flaw inherent in standardized testing but rather a failure of teaching practices. The use of standardized testing does not inherently prevent teachers from providing a well-rounded education that incorporates multiple subjects and fosters critical thinking and creativity, but rather, it is up to teachers to create a balance between test preparation and other broader learning objectives. Moreover, standardized testing provides an objective measure of student achievement and can identify areas where students need additional support. The data provided by these tests can inform instructional decisions and help teachers target their instruction to address areas where students struggle.
When a teacher announces that there is an upcoming test, sighs and complaining will fill the room. But are standardized tests all that bad? Standardized tests are a simple and fast way to evaluate whether students understand what is required of them to learn. Many people have started to protest standardized testing because of the effect it has on students. Standardized tests should continue because they help teachers improve their teaching, allow students’ progress to be tracked over time, and they hold schools accountable for student’s learning.
There are results though that show that the ACT produces inconsistent results or no results at all, providing us with the claim that they are a hindrance and do not help provide a student’s success. The program that enforces standardized test is the Congress issued program, No Child Left Behind. This program pushes that all students have an equal chance at succeeding in high school and that all students be encouraged and pushed to bring home good grades. It is stated in a research article that “Overall, 45% of the public, and about the same percentage of parents with children in public schools (43%) – say the law overemphasizes standardized testing, based on those have heard a lot or a little about No Child Left Behind” (Heimlich). This law is one that brought along many of the standardized test that all different grades take today.
Standardized tests are frequently used in education to determine a student’s level of intelligence. Many educators believe this is a useful tool, by evaluating students on an equal level, whereas I highly disagree. In fact, students have various learning styles and working habits. Consequently, this restricts certain students from having the freedom to complete the task in their most comfortable and confident way. Standardized testing directly evaluates how much material the student has retained and whether or not he or she can complete the work in a very high anxiety and intense environment.
Standardized testing evaluates students' performance by measuring their knowledge and skills against a set of standardized criteria. The tests are usually administered in an objective and unbiased controlled environment. Standardized testing has been increasing in recent years, with many countries using these tests to measure students' performance at various levels of education. Standardized testing has been a controversial topic in education for decades. While some believe standardized tests are necessary to evaluate children's competency, others argue that they do more harm than good.
Since elementary school, standardized tests have impacted my life negatively. In second grade, I took a standardized test to determine what pace I was moving at in mathematics and English. In both subjects, I was one point away from being in the Duke Tip honors program.. After second grade, the tests were more tedious. They took longer because the problems were harder.
Since the 1800’s, people have been using exams to measure the intelligence of individuals. The first modern standardized test of intelligence was created by French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1905, which was later incorporated into the IQ test (Fletcher, 2009). Today’s most common versions of standardized tests are the SAT and ACT, both used for education purposes. It is believed that the higher the person’s score, the smarter he or she is. But, how can one test determine the intelligence of a person?
