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The Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing

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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 …show more content…

They rose slightly in popularity in the 1990’s with the creation of the internet and the increased access to computers and storage space. Their related counterpart, automated scoring machines for multiple choice questions, has been very popular recently with the rise of standardized testing. The concept of having a machine or computer grade multiple choice and true-false questions is not highly contested because these are closed questions with a right and a wrong answer. The newer automated essay graders are in more muddy water because of the debate of whether or not a computer can actually score an essay with content, analysis, critical thinking, as well as ethos, pathos, and …show more content…

First, the automated essay graders are said to have been programmed based on human grading patterns and have been implemented in many schools already. According to a 2013 New York Times article by John Markoff, the startup company EdX, created by personnel from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has a program for automated essay grading, was derived from the assessment of human graders. EdX requires that the first one hundred essays are scored by a human grader, then the computer system will utilize varieties of machine-learning in order to grade other essays (Markoff). This system, therefore, is based on human teachers’ scoring criteria, but it can administer feedback instantly (Markoff). E-rater, another computer scoring program, uses similar ways to create the capability to score essays. According to Greg Phelan’s 2003 article, “For Student Essayists, An Automated Grader” the program must be trained to score essays by analyzing around 500 essays graded by two human graders. Phelan explains that “E-rater cannot read or judge an essay's quality but uses statistical analysis to determine which linguistic features are characteristic of each human scoring level, typically on a scale from 1 to 6” (Phelan). This means that if a human grader made a flaw, the program will not be one hundred

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Teachers see it, professors see it, and employers are seeing it now too. These technologies at our disposal are here to make our lives easier, and teach us things we didn’t already know, or forgot. Instead of using them to teach us, we use them to correct us, move on, and forget. If spell check says you spelled a word wrong, make note of it, correct it, move on, and remember” (Zorzini). This new technology has the possibility of helping us, but instead we use it for silly things that won’t matter 10 years from now.

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This is a fairly short video about Smarter Balanced Assessment. Smarter Balanced assessment is a computer generated assessment that uses both multiple choice, short, and long essay questions. The Smarter Balanced Assessment includes longer performance based tasks that can happen over a longer period of time. Scoring for Smarter Balanced is either completed by the computer or teachers that are trained and calibrated (which means that each scorer will come up with the same score).

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456 Words | 2 Pages

Most students in the United States go through their K- 12 schooling years not knowing how to write a proper essay. Most teachers are all about short cuts and getting papers done with the least amount of work as possible. This has led to college students not knowing the basic skills that professors assume they already know. With teachers avoiding teaching necessary writing skills and today’s technology creating shortcuts to use for everything, students are not only having trouble comprehending the English language, but also with writing grammatically correct essays. In the article “For $100k, You Would At Least Think That College Grads Could Write,” contributor George Leef expresses his opinion on the flaws in writing education in the United States.

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Students are faced with the dilemma of learning the content at hand or spending time on more exciting things. This supports the idea that there is a moral choice when using artificial intelligence in an academic setting. If teachers can introduce artificial intelligence in a way that engages learning, such as revising and studying an essay written by artificial intelligence, then students will be less likely to use it for plagiarism. The moral

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Essays and Essays, Oh My! In the article, "The end of the College Essay," Rebecca Schuman takes a stance on eliminating college essays in required courses. She states that oral assessments would be better testing methods and that students are going to plagiarize regardless. I believe that this argument is agreeable to an extent. Rebecca makes valid points, but some of them are not developed thoroughly.

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1010 Words | 5 Pages

I realized the author was referencing my style of assessment when he described the traditional music teacher’s grading system. Since I teach grades 2-12 and much of my day is spent teaching very large class sizes, I tend to rely solely on visual and auditory formative assessments and base my summative assessments on overall effort, participation, and attendance at required performances. I am constantly making “mental notes” of how engaged and self-motivated individual students appear to be while we are preparing for upcoming events. This has left me with scoring and grading in a subjective manner. I do administer written tests relating to music theory, instrument families, music history, and composers, but much of my students’ final grades result in their daily participation and effort based on individual patterns and trends throughout the class period.

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Both authors give perfect examples at the beginning of their article to give sometype of idea to the reader of why a student is using A.I Chatbot and why a professor has to find a way to teach students around the cheating system. All students want one thing in school which is to have perfect grades in school and all professors have one goal which is to better their students and prepare them for life. So the solution for students is to use a system that gives them an A paper yet isn’t cheating in their mind yet is using their materials, and for teachers it is to try to keep them away from the technology in class and make them do the assignments during class time. Unfortunately this system won’t work for every school in the country, making the A.I Chatbots have the upper hand in the system, having to eventually change this source to a key part of learning in the

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Therefore, making it impossible to compare the actual cognitive performance of individual or groups of students. For this discussion, it may be shown that standardized testing is an ineffective system in the evaluation of student performance as a whole. Standardized tests may come in diverse forms, multiple-choice and true-false formats are usually used for large-scale testing situations for the simple reason that computers can score them more quickly, consistently, and more cost effective, but that is the only upside. Questions are written by humans but graded by machines, paradoxical.

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694 Words | 3 Pages

Today the world revolves around technology and schools are starting to incorporate technology as a resource for students to use in class. Do you think this will benefit your school into becoming a paperless school? V.I.S.A should become a paperless school because most classes already rely on technology to do work, it can help students in the future, and sometimes textbooks aren’t always the best resource. V.I.S.A should become a paperless school because most classes already rely on technology. According to Kerry Gallagher, technology is growing into our daily lives even more; it’s better to use it for educational purposes than just social media and messages.

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The thought is to identify regions where understudies generally come up short, or fall behind and advance change, not rebuff them. In addition, tests help expel predisposition a few educators may display towards understudies and make the assessment procedure more target. This is generally accomplished by utilizing uncommon programmed machines that score exams. Additionally, because of the use of these techniques, the capability of human mistake is diminished, or even dispensed

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444 Words | 2 Pages

Does standardize testing really give an accurate view of a student’s learning or ability? If you’re really thinking hard on that one, the answer is an obvious no.” No you say” will let me explain why I say no to standardize test. Standardize testing is such a basic thing that it doesn’t take into account that we forgot not everyone is the same or learns the same. Some people are absolutely terrible at test but great in class.

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577 Words | 3 Pages

Studies conducted by professors at several universities demonstrate the positive impact of robo-readers on students’ quality of writing. Reporting on the follow-up interviews with the students using robo-readers, these studies identified student’s change in behaviour in response to immediate, personalized and non-judgmental evaluations and recommendations of the computerized tool. The students feel more comfortable to receive and accept criticism from a machine than from a human reviewer. This stimulated the students to use the tool, implement the suggestions and ultimately improve on their writing

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1022 Words | 5 Pages

It is proven that a lot of these scorers do not take their job seriously and are more likely to grade poorly or inaccurately (Pearson, 2014). For this reason, standardized exams should be produced by educators. Also, all educators should also be required to add a variety of assessment tools in their exams along with a steady guideline that is constant throughout each school. Educators at each school should also grade each exam as well as long as no teacher grades their own student’s exam and each student’s name is coded under a serial number to keep the anonymity of each

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764 Words | 4 Pages

Are standardized tests really a good way to judge learning in schools? When trying to get the most accurate testament on how much a student learns, testing seems to be the best option, but only on the surface. Recent studies have shown that when basing judgement of a school on standardized testing, many things that don't show up in the numbers are missed. Testing doesn't show overall morale, the learning/school environment, or academic growth of the school district. Standardized testing is important but without the other factors included, it cannot accurately represent a student's learning.

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341 Words | 2 Pages

I think I do okay on standardized test, I understand questions on a test then a quiz. I think I'm a bad test taker, because I never really do good on test. Whenever I have a test to take I always have a good feeling about it because I have studied and I understand the task, but I guess when I take the test I always intend to do a bad job I think it's because I get nervous or my mind just goes into a total blank and it stops me from doing my test. I really need to work not getting nervous when I take test because it a big influence in my grades. I'm a good worker when it comes to homework, but test aren't my thing.

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