Positive Impacts Of Standardized Testing

Standardized testing is known to improve students’ education, but is it really needed in school? Standardized testing determines whether a student is prepared for the next grade based on their test scores. While some students do great on their test others struggle a lot. Not all students are good test takers; majority of the students do good in school but struggle when it comes down to testing. While many agree that standardized testing helps improve students education, it shouldn’t be necessary in school because one test score shouldn’t determine a student’s readiness or academic level.

To many students standardized testing has become another part of schooling that is dreaded. Standardized testing has been a part of school since the nineteen-thirties; in those days it was used as a way to measure students that had special needs. Since the time that standardized test have been in American schools there has been many programs that have placed an importance on the idea of standardized testing such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Evans 1). Over the years the importance of standardized testing has increased tremendously and so has the stakes, not only for teachers but also students. All states in the United States of America have state test in order to measure how much students learn, and help tell how well the

Texas takes the STAAR, Alabama the ARMT, and Hawaii the HSA. Each state in the U.S. has a standardized test required of every student. From the ACT and SAT to the STAAR tests, standardized testing has become common practice for almost every student. The earliest records of standardized testing are when in China, anyone wanting to get a job in government had to fill out their knowledge of Confucian philosophy and poetry in examination. As more and more kids began to go to school during the Industrial Revolution, standardized testing spread as a way to quickly and easily test a large number of students. But not everyone agrees with the tests, stating that they are unreliable, and that the stakes are too high. Standardized tests cause immense amount of stress for not only students, but teachers as well. And the tests might not even be effective, causing more anxiety than it's worth.

When people think of the education system, most can say that there are some problems, though they might not be able to pinpoint what needs to change first. If you ask most teachers, they will say that the first thing that needs to be changed in the schooling system to help the students more is the standardized testing. They will say that while it can be helpful it has a lot of faults and needs to be updated or changed to help its students. Standardized testing has often been a topic for discussion, between parents and people in the schooling system. It seems that a lot of people either hate standardized testing for not giving every child a chance to succeed, or love it for being a fair way to test whether a child knows what they need to know at their age. There have been many articles, books, and documentary’s debating on whether or not standardized testing is doing more harm then good. There was a comic made that shows the brutality and bluntness of what standardized testing is really like. Standardized Testing causes too much stress by putting unfair expectations on teens and doesn’t give every single student the chance to succeed.

Why standardized tests people say, well in this article a man named Michelle Rhee, A former Washington, DC, schools chancellor has made it clear that everyone should be treated the same. He is saying that having these tests can show people with disabilities what they can do. Having different things for them should not be allowed and is rude. He is trying to get these tests all over the country to show how talented we are. He loves to hear back from the parents. The parents usually say they love standardized test because they get to see how their child is doing. He is also saying that having standardized test is a good thing to have for education. He thinks it tells us how well everything is going. He says,"You can't separate them, and to try to do so creates two, unequal systems, one with accountability and one without it. This is a civil rights issue." This is Michelle Rhee supporting why we should keep standardized test.

In America, standardized testing started to show up during the Industrial Revolution when more and more children began attending school rather than working in factories or on family farms. Due to a “back to basics” movement during the 1970s, there was a big emphasis on “low-level functional skills and the proliferation of minimum-competency tests”(Marzano 9). However by the time we get to the 1990s, standardized tests began to be

One of the biggest topics in the educational world is standardized tests. All fifty states have their own standards following the common core curriculum. There are many positives and negatives that go with the standardized tests. A standardized test is any type of “examination that's administered and scored in a predetermined, standard manner” (Popham, 1999). These standardized tests are either aptitude tests or achievement tests. Schools use achievement tests to compare students.

Growing up in Chesapeake every student is forced to take a standardized test at the end of every class they take. Standardized testing has been a part of the educational system for so long that everyone is just accustomed to taking these tests or giving them out. Standardized testing does not just effect the students but it also effects the teachers. Chesapeake School Board should get rid of standardized testing in all grade levels because of different learning style, it limits the teachers to what they can teach and poor test scores.

The consequences of the SAT have been seen as physically and mentally deteriorating for students. However, not only does the stress affect the students preparing for the SAT, but it also affects the instructors who are required to teach the material. Many students are being “forced into their respective testing rooms for up to three hours per day, slaving away on exams that most of us have struggled through (Ayers).” Likewise, “due to the pressures faced by administration, teachers [are] essentially [forced to] teach students how to approach and solve problems expected on standardized exams (Kokoszka).” Furthermore, according to Thomas Kellaghan et al, “testing pressures teachers into teaching for the test and thus leads to a narrowing of the

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Albert Einstein, a German-born physicist. This quote is referring perfectly to standardized testing by saying something along the lines of, you can’t judge a student’s ability to perform well in school by giving him/her a standardized test. Standardized testing is wrong just because not all students can perform well on a test, including myself. Administration often want to take the easiest way out to collect the data they need to place students in classes instead placing them according to something else; or in such way that is fair to all students. Education is a big part of our nation today with one of the biggest components being standardized testing, which does not accurately measure full capabilities of students from elementary on up to the high school level.

This country is filled with children who come from all different backgrounds with all different learning abilities and strengths. To put them all under the same standards, limits our youth, telling them that regardless of what they do know, if they don’t know this list of things they are not adequate. I do believe that guidelines are great for keeping children’s learning on track; nonetheless, I do not believe that a big fat test at the end of the year should be the only factor determining a child’s fate on moving on to the second grade. Standardized testing creates immense pressure on both students and teachers. Teachers have the pressure of making sure their students are prepared to pass these tests and move along the track while kids have to do it on their own despite any other contender that may get in the way. Every student in every grade is taking the same test, required to reach the same goal, and doesn’t that imply that they should have learned the same things to the same extent? Yes it does, and unfortunately, this is impossible. Children who come from low income families, experience an entirely different education experience than children who do not. According to New York Times,

Any child that is in any type of schooling knows what standardized testing is. It is required in every state of America, and not a single child likes it. In recent years a controversial issue has been weather or not standardized testing should be used to judge a person’s

For over 150 years students in the United States have been given the standardized test. Flip Today, standardized testing in our nation’s schools has become the normal for …placement…etc for students in grades three through eight in all fifty states. In twelve of the fifty states standardized testing is required to graduate high school. Graduation qualifying exams are used in 12 of the 50 states. ***Standardized test measures a student’s academic a standardized test measures or standardized tests measure…progress. Many argue these standardized tests take away valuable time and resources from what students should be learning in the classroom, as well as funding the school receives, standardized testing is very costly with the test manufactures having control of the test. Teachers have been known to report the results of the standardized test do not come back until the summer as most tests are administered later in the school year so teachers have time to prepare the students for the test, once teacher receive the results they are on summer break and are preparing for a new group of students. Other teachers state there is no feedback about the student's scores so there is no feedback on what needs to be improved from the teacher's point. Studies show that many students have test anxiety, more so in students with disabilities, with

The United States education system has been using standardized testing since the 1800’s. Since the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 mandated annual testing in all 50 states their use has escalated tremendously. Since 2002 America has dropped from 18th to 31st in mathematics and science while reading has not improved either (ProCon). The failure of the education system has been blamed on various outlooks. There may be many factors, but standardized testing has not shown a substantial positive effect. In fact, it has hurt our students, teachers and the education system as a whole. Although some say that it holds valuable information, the negatives severely outweigh the positives in standardized testing.

Today, it can be observed that society has shifted education drastically from the time schools were constituted, to now. Throughout history, schools have gone from private, where only the elite can attend, to public schools where virtually anyone can attend. One of the factors that goes along with education is standardized testing. Frederick J. Kelly, father of the standardized test, once said, “These tests are too crude to be used, and should be abandoned.” Not only has this shift occurred within education itself, but it has occurred within the testing concepts found within standardized testing so much so that the founder of these tests has chosen to give up on it.