preview

Ap English Teacher Ankur Singh

Decent Essays

As a junior in high school, Ankur Singh had a life changing english teacher. He taught Ankur about the fundamentals of critically thinking and communicating his thought process. With his newfound love of english, he decided to sign up for the AP english course for senior year. This class was a much different experience. He trudged his way through essay after essay to prepare for a test. He was not learning, not critically thinking and enhancing his knowledge; he was preparing for a test and learning how to take this test. It was a very similar situation in his AP French class. Instead of a normal lesson from the teacher, his class spent the whole time taking a practice test. Frustrated, because this nonsense test was taking up his precious …show more content…

James Popham argues “If the test covered all of the knowledge and skills in the domain, it would be far too long,” (Popham 2). This brings about the point that students learn a lot over the course of their whole life and even just one short year. The test cannot possibly bear the whole curriculum of the entire year. Therefore, it is a poor representation of a student’s complete knowledge and what they prepared the whole year for. If test writers were able to create a test that managed to portray all of the curriculum taught, the test would be never ending in length. An article on Education Week argues “not a single one of the twenty-first century skills can be assessed on a multiple choice test,” (Rebora 2). As mentioned previously, students curriculums are becoming more personalized. Teachers are looking more towards critical thinking and analyzing skills. Multiple choice tests have no way of assessing and looking at these skills, therefore, outdating these tests. Since the tests are outdated, the use of these tests for application status and student evaluations are …show more content…

This correlates directly to their ranking and teaching evaluations. Teachers feel pushed to teach a test (Layton 2). In order for teachers and schools to look good, test score of their classes need to excel. The teachers and schools feel that in order for their students to do that they need to learn how to take tests and simply more about the tests. This takes away from actually teaching the subject which is a lose-lose situation.Teachers teach a test instead of material that could go into more depth. Along the same lines, “In forty percent of districts surveyed, test results are not available until the following school year, making them useless for teachers who want to use results to help guide their work in the classroom,” (Layton 7). The tests taken by students have limited use for teachers who are in the classroom and could use them to further the student’s education. Access to these tests could improve the learning capabilities and give the teachers a broader spectrum of what needs to be focused on in the classroom. The teachers are able to see the scores and information carried with the test for the next year, but for the interest of the current students the statistics apply to it would be more appropriate to have access to the information. Teachers cannot effectively improve the learning curve to the individual

Get Access