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Why Is Standardized Testing Wrong

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Standardized Testing: Wrong Questions, Right Solutions Hundreds of schools and thousands of students across America engage in standardized testing. From the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), every student has taken a standardized test. Standardized test supposedly measures your understanding of specific topics and assess how well you can apply them. While their intentions are to help, they are doing more harm than good. Standardized testing has destroyed countless schools, student’s careers and taken away time from teachers and students.
People in our community need to stand up for themselves, their children and students by educating themselves about what happens to these test scores, …show more content…

Fig. 1 shows the Keystone Result Averages from 2016. While there is growth in the advanced placement/ proficient placement, there are still 67,482 students left behind, just in the state of Pennsylvania. That’s 12.5% of our 536,209 students tested. According to thenotebook.org, “Any student whose overall score is below Proficient must take it again. Schools are required to give students supplemental instruction before a student takes the test again.” In short, students who struggle with these tests must take a course on how to take the Keystones, and then retake them. Student’s cannot graduate without passing them, making it yet another unnecessary burden and source of stress for …show more content…

“Teachers reported delivering better lessons because they could focus their preparation on how to teach, not what not to teach.” Wrote Craig Hochbein and Marty Pollio in an article entitled, “Making grades more meaningful.” While time is saved when teachers have a curriculum to follow, the curriculum is focused on the best way to take a test, and how to score well, rather than actually learning the content. Standardized tests take time out of teacher’s busy schedule as well as the students. They should be able to teach what they want and help the students grew as people and find styles that fit them best, not conform to a standard set by a few people.
In addition to wasting class time, these tests ask questions that are opinions or multiple answers depending on perspective. Sara Holbrook, a poet whose poems were used in the Texas state assessment tests (STAAR Test), wrote, “When I realized I couldn’t answer the questions posed about two of my own poems, … My eyes glazed over. I checked to see if anyone was looking. The questions began to swim on the page. Waves of insecurity. My brain in full

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Proponents see standardized testing as a way of making testing more efficient and effective by minimizing cost and increasing people’s accountability for their performance in the system. Opponents on the other hand argue that the systems has limitations based on its very nature on what can be tested and as a result of these standards needing to be met sacrifice some very important aspects of students education experience as well as force onto students and teachers a one size fits all model that has failed to deliver on its promises. After having reviewed all the evidence in detail it becomes clear to me that standardized testing is not an effective system for educating students and does more bad than good

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Act two is a good example of the comical encounter of Polonius and Hamlet. Dr John Dover Wilson goes on to say that, “The second act of Hamlet is comedy; a comedy of masks. But the comedy does not stop there; it runs right on into the act that follows.” To put it simply, act two shows the humour in Hamlet and Polonius’ relationship, which also helps us know more about Hamlet’s ingenuity and Polonius’ incongruity (Wilson). Polonius starts his mission of spying on Hamlet but this is succeeded by Hamlet mocking Polonius.

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1754 Words | 8 Pages

These standardized tests are severely damaging the educational system. There is an extremely high budget, and high stakes achievement that rides on your test scores. Although all states use some form of standardized testing, the testing proves to be inefficient, and should be eliminated. As stated above standardized testing proves to be very stressful on the test takers.

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There is a huge range of people that take the test (Carol, Kathleen 2). Each student is going to have a different way of life, family, and thinking which can cause some student’s answers to vary from others. The tests also treat students as if they are all identical people, which can cause unfairness while testing. There is no way of knowing for certain that every child is going to have the same amount of knowledge like other students going into that test (Margie 2). Something one should take into account is : some students do have learning disabilities.

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462 Words | 2 Pages

Teachers should be able to teach students, not for the sake of passing an exam, but for the sake of expanding their existent knowledge. There are many students in the state of Texas, as well as the entire nation, that have had their potential overlooked because they did not meet the expectations of standardized testing. Although students are indeed placing emphasis on higher scores for a standardized test, they apparently do not retain the information long enough to make a lasting effect on their knowledge. This is according to a 2001 study published by the Brookings Institution which found that 50-80% of year-over-year test score improvements were temporary and "caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in

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1093 Words | 5 Pages

“ Standardized test items are not parallel with typical classroom skills and behaviors. Due to the fact that questions have to be generalizable to the entire population, most items assess general knowledge and understanding. ”(Hurst) These tests limit many things and cause a huge disadvantage to not only students, but to the schools as well. Scores don't provide very much information when evaluating a student's achievement, a teacher's competency, or the success of a particular school or program.

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467 Words | 2 Pages

Standardized Testing You are sitting in the classroom and the teacher says you have a test tomorrow, and suddenly you freeze up, sweat starts coming down your face you get that feeling of anxiety in your chest. Standardized Testing has been around for about 50 years now but recently they have became more pressure- packed and ubiquitous on teens. Many individuals feel as tho Standardized Testing such as the SATs, ACTs,Eogs, and Eocs do not measure their true intelligence it is indeed a waste of time and payment. People feel as tho these test are never based upon anything they know and that it is rigged so that they can not succeed.

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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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1111 Words | 5 Pages

Standardized tests are “any form of test that requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or a selection of questions from a common bank of questions, in the same way, and that is scored in a ‘standard’ or consistent manner” and are used as an objective way to measure

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730 Words | 3 Pages

Standardized tests are said to be the easiest and most efficient way to determine if teachers have taught standards and whether or not students have met standards, but the tests are not a fair measurement. According to Popham, “Employing standardized achievement tests to ascertain educational quality is like measuring temperature with a tablespoon. Tablespoons have a different measurement mission than indicating how hot or cold something is. Standardized achievement tests have a different measurement mission than indicating how good or bad a school/teacher is.” There is too much room for error to determine if a teacher is considered “good” or “bad.”

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1248 Words | 5 Pages

With this data, teachers can accommodate to that student’s needs which conclusively leads to a more productive and effective way of teaching. Standardized testing also ensures that the level of teaching content is consistent; which means that a 5th grade teacher won’t be instructing 3rd grade material. In brief, standardized tests helps schools to improve. In addition, standardized testing displays how a school honestly is performing. In the article, “From a Consumer Perspective Briefings on Educational Research From Education Consumer Network,” states, “Given that schools have substantial incentives to maintain a favorable public impression, an absence

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552 Words | 3 Pages

Have you ever wondered, are the standardized tests helping my child, is it helping them learn? The articles from procon say that standardized tests are not helping the students, or even the teachers. One reason, that I believe that the standardized tests are not helping are because, it will lead to disappointment, and that they are just a waste of time. A social science teacher at Hillsdale High School states,”The common core is at risk for failure, not because the standards are bad per se,but because with standardized accountability, we again won’t get a real picture of achievement, people will be disappointed, and the standards and testing will run their course” Also, Carolyn J Heinrich, PhD, states,”There are little to no positive effect of these [test-based accountability] systems overall on the student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and…..

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1099 Words | 5 Pages

Some schools will spend as much as a quarter of the class time “teaching the test,” instead of the curriculum (Is the Use of Standardized Tests Improving Education in America?, 1). All this does for the students is force them to lose instructional time, and cram during the time they do have at the beginning of the class time. This also leads back to my first point with the fact that they are not accurate. Because the students have had class time taken from them, the tests cannot test the information they learned because they had a short amount of time to learn a lot of information. Not only this, but standardized tests have not improved the student achievement since they have been

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569 Words | 3 Pages

This demonstrates that tests like STAAR, and other tests similar to that, don’t provide the information needed to evaluate a schools performance. 70% of

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694 Words | 3 Pages

For 50 years standardized testing has been around. They have come through all forms such as PARCC, CMAS, TCAPP, SATS, ACTS and so many others. According to TIME Magazine, over 1.5 million students are taking the tests. Even though the tests were originally created to recruit soldiers during World War 2, they have now become a way to measure student’s intelligence. These tests have created a gripping hold of stress over the students.

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