Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing

Standardized Tests and Final Exams: The Assessments Which May Determine a Student’s Future

Intro:

Excellent test scores show excellent schooling, while poor test scores show poor schooling. That has become the value of standardized tests in schools over the years (Popham, James). Additionally, those tests can write the entire future of a student, starting at the point when doing poorly on a standardized test can ruin your hope of getting into a good college. But the question is: is the stress that students build up from standardized tests truly worth it? The answer is debatable. Similarly, another strongly debated issue is final exams, the exams that assess what students have learned over the entire semester (Are Those Final Exams).

This is evidently unfair, because some animals, like the monkey, will find this task much easier than others, such as the fish. In reality, the fish could represent the poor, who don’t have enough money to buy textbooks to study and do well on standardized tests compared to the rest of the society, represented by the monkey (Staffa, Caroline). This example describes one of the disadvantages of standardized testing. There are many other cons of these tests too. For example, the stress that students have due to the tests can encourage them to cheat, take performance drugs, and do other illicit acts. Also, students are not truly learning, since test companies do not give any feedback on how to do better and improve test scores. Another negative aspect of standardized tests is that they declare everything a student has learned and experienced over the years as a single number, the student’s score. The poor scorers would then lose self-esteem, while the well scorers are pressurized to keep scoring well, many of whom completely lose time for fun. Those well scorers might not even be as smart as they were thought to be. Instead, they might just be good test-takers, or they might have just guessed random answers and coincidentally got them right (Armstrong, Thomas). Another huge component of final exams is their costs. States spend about 1.7 billion a year on standardized testing.

Both forms of assessment have pros and cons. For example, a benefit of standardized testing is that it allows students to be compared with peers statewide, locally, and nationally. However, a negative is that it builds up too much stress in students. Likewise, an advantage of final exams is that they keep students focused for the entire year. But, a disadvantage is that students may not actually be retaining their knowledge from the beginning of the semester till the end. Due to these concerns, there have been proposals to replace or alter the system of giving these two assessments. After many years of contemplation, counties, states, and the national government has made decisions to reduce the number of standardized tests, and replace final exams with other means of assessment such as projects and