Lowering Standards Set Students Up For Failure

Alfie Kohn’s Article “How Not to get into College” analyses many key factors of how the current school system does not work and how we as members of society need to work together extensively to remodel the system to ensure the success of future students by valuing education over grades. By looking at how students only join clubs and and worship numerical grades only to impress colleges; students facing pressure from parents, teachers, and society to get good grades and succeed in life; and how students live through many mental health implications due to a multitude of factors surrounding their educational life, we can determine that systemic factors of this society have turned students of this generation into grade grubbers.

Whether we realize it or not, test scores play a vital role in many people’s self esteem. A person who frequently scores high will be confident that they are very intelligent and will expect others to see them that way. Asimov attested to this when he stated, “All my life I’ve been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I’m highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think that too.” (Asimov, 536). On the other hand, those who score low on tests often write themselves off to be unintelligent. Emphasis on the importance of the ACT or SAT test scores can lead an adolescent to conclude that he or she is not capable of succeeding in college and lead them to not pursue higher education. The tragedy is that we may pass on opportunities because we have labelled ourselves unintelligent based on a test score which is not a true refelection of our

In the story “I Just Wanna Be Average” the author Mike Rose argues that society very often neglects and doesn’t see the full value and potential of students.

Additionally, Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” There are different forms of intelligence that go beyond what our school system measures. Students are not a unit to be measured, and students cannot be assigned a numerical value to identify their intelligence. Students are diverse—they learn at different speeds, and they learn in different ways. Focusing solely on test scores is hurting our students and deviating away from building our society on success and excellence. Critics are slowly realizing the problems associated with standardized tests—they create anxiety, they are extremely biased, and they do not measure the ability to think deeply.

Standardized testing has been around since the early 1900’s. Today, it determines a high school student’s future. Every year juniors in high school start to prepare months in advance for the SAT’s and ACT’s. Along with the test itself, comes stress that is not necessary. The debate of standardized tests defining a student’s academic ability or not has become a recent popular controversial topic. Many colleges and universities are starting to have test optional applications because they are realizing that a single test score does not demonstrate the knowledge of a student. There is more value in a student that should rule an acceptance or rejection. In the article, “SAT Scores Help Colleges Make Better Decisions” Capterton states, “The SAT has proven to be valid, fair, and a reliable data tool for college admission” (Capterton). Capterton, president of the College Board, believes that the SAT’s and ACT’s should be used to determine a student’s acceptance because it is an accurate measure. What Capterton and deans of admissions of colleges and universities don’t know is the abundant amount of resources upper class families have for preparation, the creative talents a student has outside of taking tests, and the amount of stress they put on a 17 year old.

Parents and professors speculate why children no longer display excitement and ambition for learning. Most share the common goal of educating the youth to take on the “rights and responsibilities of citizens” (Ravitch 109). Unfortunately, educational requirements have strayed from the original purpose and began to aim their attention toward the “importance” of standardized testing. As a current high school senior, my experience has been that students are branded by their grades and test scores as if they determine who we are as a person. Diane Ravitch’s “The Essentials of A Good Education”, successfully critiques the extensive use of standardized testing in order to pursue change in our education systems and prove that focusing on test scores corrupts a child’s inner creativity.

When children are told they are ‘special’ and are praised for everything it does two things: it reduces their aspiration to put in the effort and it reduces their want to be challenged. In the article, “ Are Kids Too Coddled?” by Frank Bruni, published in New York Times on November 23,2013, Bruni argues that today’s kids are living in a world where they are protected from the world’s hardships. Bruni points to how “ [many n kids at all grade levels are Bubble-Wrapped in a culture that praises effort nearly as much as it does accomplishment”(par.23). Not long after the Common Core system was put into place, parents were pulling their kids out of tests because the results upset the kids and they said they were “too hard.” Not only are the parent making sure the kids are protected from feeling bad, the schools are too.Sports teams are making sure everyone gets to be captain and trophies are awarded to everyone who plays. With everyone winning and doing things the “easy way” these kids

How far a student can go in life is already pre-determined by the generation before him. Success is no longer made up of solely intellectual ability, but rather if the streets the student walks through is gang-ridden or not, if their parents are absentees, and other conditions in which the child grows up in. Valerie Strauss expresses these concerns in her article, “What the Numbers Really Tell Us About America’s Public Schools” in which she discusses how income levels correlate with students’ success rate which is further accentuated through Kamiak and Mariner High School’s Standardized Test Results. “Motivation, a Major Factor in U.S. Student Test Performance” by Dian Schaffhauser continues this idea of external problems affecting low scores

Bruni writes, “Many kids at all grade levels are Bubble-Wrapped in a culture that praises effort nearly as much as it does accomplishment” (par. 24). By glorifying even average work, students are not motivated to try harder to achieve the desired outcome. As a result, American students do not rank as well as students from other countries in international tests. Giving students harder material and higher expectations will help them unlock their true potential. At first, students may find it difficult. However, after putting in more work to achieve results, they will feel more confident in their skills and will be able to compete with students around the

Many students throughout the American education system struggle due to the fact that they have to take a standardized test. But, this struggle differs for each student, some are too lazy to take them while others are having difficulty performing well on these tests. As a student who learned English as a second language, I could relate with the people who are having trouble performing well on standardized tests. When I was in high school there was nothing more frightening than Standardized tests. There was a lot of emphasize on these tests and they had the power to determine my future in the means of deciding which colleges I could attend. But, I wasn’t alone in this matter, not all students perform to their potential on Standardized tests. No matter how hard I tried to study for these tests, I was just not doing as well as my class mates. It made me feel like I was beneath all my other class mates and I thought they were intellectually superior. But, I met other like me who were not good at taking test and didn’t perform well on these

“High school grades reflect years of effort and are more reliable assessment of college potential than test scores.” Historians detected that standardized testing started back in the seventh-century in China. The government of China began to organize written exams to select people for the civil service. Also many educators try to make sure that they are following the right requirements but some of them don’t and do all sorts of stuff with the results. Many individuals would say that standardized testing is a helpful way of learning from what the student knows and doesn’t, but the consequences that teachers found out of the standardized tests are making the students have a decrease in critical thinking.

Each essay in this book gives its own perspective along with their own arguments and case studies to demonstrate that high stakes testing and assessment are failing American kids. Some empirical evidence is used but it’s mainly arguments with specific examples from the field. This begins early on, literally in the introduction, when Kohn makes the argument that grades and tests predict

“Our educational goal [is] the production of caring, competent, loving, lovable people” . The students found in the schools across the United State are the future of America. They are the doctors, teachers, business people, lawyers and many other roles, that will be out in the workforce in the years to come. What they learn in school will impact them immensely; it is the responsibility of a teacher to give students the best education in order to ensure the common good of the future. It is essential for students to not only learn content matter, but also the skills to enable them to participate in a democracy. Due to standardized testing, the emphasis of education has become on score and rankings rather than learning. A standardized test does not look at the whole student, the scores provided are on a very narrow aspect of education. In the classroom, there are countless ways for teachers to assess the student as a whole person not as just a score. Standardized tests scores should not be the sole criteria for determining a student’s academic achievement.

In many high schools, students that try to achieve are often laughed at because it’s not the “cool” thing to do. High school students have to become so accustomed to putting down the “nerds” and over-achievers that only a handful of them remain in each grade. By putting down these students, it has swayed them towards the back of the crowd instead of leading it and being a good example. This results in grades being lower because the intelligent students aren’t leading by example anymore so no one has any

Schools are and will forever be learning institutions, but learning isn’t limited to purely comprehension and fact memorization that can be found in books. Furthermore, knowledge is an unquantifiable metric and similarly, grades and scores have a multitude of factors that could affect the results. This is not to devalue good academic standing but rather raising a question of “Do we want to develop students holistically or