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Why Is Standardized Testing Necessary

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The First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama once said "If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that." Standardized testing is another way students scores can be identified and critiqued. It also helps the school acquire information and statistics about the weaknesses of their students and what they can do to make improvements. The DOE prepares students in advance, from elementary school which they can develop test taking skills that can help them throughout their educational life. In today's society, test scores have become a pathway to great opportunities including college admissions and scholarships, etc. Also test scores can be used for evaluating the effectiveness …show more content…

It measures how students are progressing and the information is used to improve public schools. Parents want to know how their kids are doing in school and educators want their students to succeed in every possible way. Michelle also states that tests serve many reasons, to identify strengths and weaknesses. The skills and knowledge learned in school are going to be used for future careers and to compete with others for the same reasons. But a new study by Teach Plus, found that on average, in grades three and seven, just 1.7 percent of classroom time is devoted to preparing for and taking standardized tests. However, students can be knowledgeable in their own way. If they are not forced to learn, they will learn on their own. Students have the capabilities the test makers do not see. Standardized testing do not fully define students abilities and it's just one factor out of many for life changing opportunities. Joan Harris says that contrary to popular assumptions about standardized testing, the tests do a poor job of measuring student achievement. They fail to measure such important attributes as creativity and critical thinking skills. Students offer a variety of skills that aren’t in the standardized

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Leslie Rayburn is a teacher in Santa Cruz, California, and she, too, believes that this is unfair to students, and to teachers who are graded based on their students’ grades. She explains that, ‘the children who perform poorly on multiple choice standardized tests (but perhaps might perform well on an open-ended form of test) are labeled as “less intelligent’ and the school suffers” (Rayburn) Since progress of a student is mainly viewed based upon the outcome of standardized test scores, the lower-performing students are seen as “not college- ready”, which creates a roadblock to a student about where they may want to attend college. The fact of the matter is that no two students are the same, learn the same, or test the same, so standardized tests are inaccurate measurements of a student’s full learning capability and

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1749 Words | 7 Pages

Parents can compare how their students are doing compared to other schools and even other states. Standardized testing allows schools to compare their results against other schools results. Another reason standardized testing is good is because the tests allow the students’ progress to be tracked throughout the year. If these students are taking similar tests yearly, then it is easy to see if they are improving, declining or staying at the same level. This is very important because then a parent can know what’s going on with their child and if they are improving that’s probably good news

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561 Words | 3 Pages

Standardized tests are an unreliable measure of a student’s performance. A study in 2001 by Brookings Institution showed that fifty to eighty percent of test score improvements were not permanent and were because of little changes that did not pertain to anything related to long term learning. Basically, students learned little tricks to help their scores, but did not truly master the skill to apply it critically. 2. High stakes tests are used in job areas such as physicians and lawyers, allowing bosses to ensure their workers have the necessary knowledge for their professions.

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807 Words | 4 Pages

Standardized Testing is a great way to see your students growth throughout the years, For these reasons there should not be more testing in schools. these hours) of testing show stress and damage to their education. These test are a waste of time, show distance, create behavior change and may change your social life or future.

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1183 Words | 5 Pages

This puts teachers and students under a great amount of pressure to make sure the test scores are high. By using standardized tests to measure educational quality this causes several issues. For one, these tests use questions that do not pertain to things taught in school. This means students have to either know something already or it needs to be taught at home. Neither of those situations is something that teachers can help with since it is up to the student to learn.

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647 Words | 3 Pages

In fact, the increasing use of standardized testing will do more damage than good, because of its failure to capture the entirety of a student’s body of work. Furthermore, the overwhelming stress that the United States government, and school systems have placed on the usage of standardized tests has become detrimental to American education, and is not the most effective way to gauge the intelligence of American students. The American educational system should be fixated on providing each child enough attention and information so they can succeed in that class and in the future. However, the increasing focus on having to pass a standardized test has blinded schools of the real goal, because they are required to get their students to pass the standardized tests.

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425 Words | 2 Pages

The tests are ineffective because they don’t measure all of what the students know, and what is important. The text stated, “Standardized Tests are IQ tests from one-hundred years ago. They are outdated.” Some reasons to why Standardized Tests are ineffective are that they don’t measure student’s creativity, and they make students feel they aren’t smart. In the 1950’s they only tested every two years.

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722 Words | 3 Pages

“Standardized testing can also help standardize individual students’ educations”(7). This gives students the help they need by seeing how well they are doing on different levels of subjects. “In addition to comparing students against one another or identifying problematic schools or districts, standardized tests can also illustrate student progress over time”(7). The standardized test allows teachers to see what students struggle with and what they are excellent at. “Taking the same or similar tests over the years can allow students to indicate measurable improvement”(7).

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1345 Words | 6 Pages

Capable students may do poorly on tests, causing them to blame themselves and their teachers. Standardized testing is insensitive to an individual student's learning style (Bhattacharyya). For example, some students are visual learners, meaning they learn by seeing things, while others are auditory learners, meaning they learn by hearing things, and yet others are tactile learners, meaning that they learn by doing (“Standardized”). For some students, it can be hard for them to express their answers on paper and would much rather say their answers out loud. There can be instances where students are not placed in special placement at all, or they are wrongly placed.

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795 Words | 4 Pages

They have to do well in order to get into a good school, they are required to do certain things during the testing periods that are stressful, and the list goes on. Having standardized tests allows students to have another chance to learn how to

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1191 Words | 5 Pages

Unfortunately, standardized testing only gives a rough estimate of what a student can do or knows. It is impossible to tell if a student will improve, or even tell if the student just guessed on all of their answers for the test. This explains how standardized tests do not measure the correct information that school’s are actually searching

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1741 Words | 7 Pages

They also show what specific areas a student might be struggling in (Popham, 8-15). The tests also allow the School Board to decide if a school needs extra assistance with anything involving Math, Science, and English (VDOE website). Although these are valid reasons to keep standardized testing in place, there are many more reasons why they should be either removed or improved in some way. One reason why standardized testing should be improved or replaced is that students may understand material but might type an answer wrong or something technical on their test.

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1159 Words | 5 Pages

These people see standardized testing as inaccurate and a false way of measuring academic achievement. That is only a few of the many things seen as cons for standardized testing. Along with that the tests fail to measure such important aspects such as creativity and critical thinking skills. Studies indicate that standardized tests reward superficial thinking and might discourage more interpretive thinking. Next, as a result of the small fragment of knowledge that is tested, standardized tests capture a incomplete picture of student achievement.

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1098 Words | 5 Pages

This method will prevent students from gaining the knowledge they seek and will not work to their advantage later on in the future. Most high school classes are teaching students how to take tests rather than teaching them how to skilfully answer them and master them. This causes students to enter college and university unprepared as they develop little skill-making abilities. High-stake standardized testing, such as the SAT, is burdensome for students. The standardized test scores that a student receives determine which university a student can attend and this greatly impacts his or her future.

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1068 Words | 5 Pages

Standardized testing does not require much of an effort. These tests are checked by the computer thus, saving more time and since these tests are administered in the same manner, it would be easier for them to evaluate the test results because these tests have its own standards. These tests are also objective and are based by general-knowledge thus, making the test results unbiased and non-subjective. Educators will also be able to compare and evaluate a student’s progress over a period of time. These tests would show whether a student has performed well or not (OccupyTheory, 2014).

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