Holly L. Hughes Mrs. Christen Melton 10th Lit/Comp Honors 3 February 2017 Are Standardized Tests Trustable? Standardized tests are annual tests used to measure student achievement. Although standardized testing may be overused and lacking significant change in methodology, it is a reliable form of assessment used to identify areas where students may struggle. Teacher-graded assessments are undependable alternatives to standardized tests. Perelman, the director of writing at MIT, analyzed, “For instance, many parts of the formula look at ratios -- the ratio of grammar error to total number of words, ratio of mechanics errors to word count, and so forth. Thus someone who writes lots of words, and keeps them simple (even to the point of nonsense), will do well,” (Jaschik 2011). While the automated grading system may be methodical and formulaic, it is a technology that is supposed to be systematic and formulaic. If the automated grading system were not systematic and formulaic, it would not be reliable and therefore the same as teacher assessment. Chaitanya Ramineni, an Educational Testing Service researcher, revealed to reporter Scott Jaschik, “One of the problems that surfaced in the review was that some humans doing the evaluation were not scoring students' essays on some prompts in consistent ways, based on the rubric used by New Jersey Institute of Technology. While many writing instructors may not trust automated …show more content…
Teachers may grade papers inconsistently and not always stick strictly to a rubric. While that may be helpful towards the students they are more lenient toward in short term,