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The Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing

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In the last 10 years, standards and testing have dominated many discussions on the quality of the American public education. In the article, “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality,” explains standardized tests as an examination that is scored in a “predetermined”, “standard manner” and predicts how students will perform in any educational setting (Popham, par.3). I believe that these tests are not enough to assess students fairly and do not take true measure of a student’s educational quality. Standardized tests should be only one measure of performance, and evaluated alongside other assessment tools that include classroom work, students’ hard work, and teacher evaluations. In my consideration, testing in its current format …show more content…

Going on with our second reason, we can see that these tests are also extremely unreliable due to a number of reasons. These tests only measure a small portion of what makes an education meaningful. Standardized testing is not meant to assess student learning but rank them. Robert Hach, in his article, quotes, “Tests have always ranked students into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ ‘successes’ and ‘failures’” (par. 7). Sadly, this does seem to be the case in today’s public education since students are only measured on a small scale of standards. Students should be assessed on better criterions from classroom work, grades, students’ hard work, ability of skills, and teacher evaluations (Kellaghan, Madaus, and Airasian 11). There is much more to a student’s educational career; not just a few standards, which happen to lead their way to failure. Another factor that plays a huge role in the unreliability of these tests is when they are used to make big decisions in students’ lives, such as moving up a grade or high school graduation or even getting into an exceptional college (Henningfield 17). For example, the bad scores earned on these tests create an issue into getting in a higher-level college or university. I happen to believe that this may seem to happen quite a bit with many students; when they lower their expectations in applying to great colleges just because those colleges require your test scores to show a certain level of

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