Pros And Cons 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.

We shouldn’t have to take standardized tests because they don’t provide any feedback on how to perform better. The tests treat everyone who takes them feel identical, they don’t make you feel different. These tests make create a huge amount of stress on teachers and students. Most test takers can handle certain levels of stress but others can’t handle any amount. There should be other options that schools and colleges could use or get rid of the tests all

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.

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.

Since Middle School, I was not opposed to standardized testing. I thought of it as a way of testing us of what we have learned. Although, after reading some articles about standardized testing I am re-thinking the pros and cons. From personal experience, I thought of it as a challenge to pass them. But now that reminisce about it, I noticed some of the cons of standardized testing. I remember having a week or two dedicated for testing, and in case of students failing they had to take time to redo it. It would take a while for all the students to finish their tests. And after remembering how it was back in those times I was more on the opposed side.

Would you like to take a test that is unfair, expensive, and unreliable? Chances are you already have. Standardized testing in schools is not only bad for the students, but also bad for our country’s future. Some might think standardized testing is a good thing, because it is the only way to measure all students the same across the country. However, this thought is wrong for many reasons.

Standardized testing has become a controversial topic in recent years, parents, students, teachers, principals and almost anyone who has a relationship with education is affected by this topic. People are either for or against standardized testing, some believe it is the only fair way to compare students others believe that the tests are too greatly stressed in school and are a nuisance to education. Standardized tests are stressed greatly, students learn testing material all year not focusing on anything else deemed unimportant by the test makers. Every student has the same amount of time and question on tests; they also are tested on the same subjects which the test makers believe are most important for children to learn. Standardized tests are used for many things such as ranking students on a national basis and government funding for schools.

Standardized Testing can be both a benefit to the educational community and a very serious problem. Standardized Testing is said to have negative effects on both the students and the teachers. Standardized Testing has created many problems and has become a very big factor in politics. Some people argue that the government is influencing the education system. While others believe that the government isn’t involved enough. There are many pros and cons to both but the cons outnumber the pros.

Standardized testing has been around for ages, but was not widely enforced until former President Bush put into law the No Child Left Behind Act. A standardized test is a major test that is administered to a large population of students that is graded in a standard manner. Recently, parents all over the country have been opting their children out of standardized testing, and for many justifiable reasons. Standardized testing should not be mandatory due to the fact that these tests do not accurately measure a student’s intelligence, they put students in a box, and they narrow the curriculum.

Even though there are many downsides to standardized testing there are still viable reasons why they are still being used today. One of the main reasons includes the easy and quick access of testing students. Standardized testing allows schools to quickly access a large amount of students at one time. This is also one of the cheapest ways to tests such a large crowd due to machinery that grades which results in low tests costs for students. These tests also help by setting a national curriculum for all high school teachers to teach in schools. “It provides guidelines for curriculum. Standardized tests give teachers a structure of what needs to be taught. This helps keep classroom material consistent across the country” (“Pros and Cons of

“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.

For every student wanting to apply to colleges, exempt classes, etc., standardized testing is put into use to measure the amount of knowledge about the subject. There are many biased opinions on why standardized testing should be banned. Many come from unscholarly critics. However, there are some critics who show both sides of a story when it comes to standardized testing. Over the years, standardized testing has shown a wide variety of grades that are not good enough for many students. Some students struggle with what they got on the standardized test simply because they are not adequate test takers. Some however have some critical advantages that “show” that they are capable of taking standardized test and knowing the material. In other words, standardized testing clearly demonstrates no abilities of what a student really has.

Standardized testing allows for something schools can compare students’ knowledge with. Although this may be true, testing is actually harmful. Standardized tests are an unfair way to be accessed because they do not accurately represent a student’s abilities. Many people don’t perform well on tests; they are smart, and understand the subject, but they don’t show it on the test. It is easy to forget something on a test, even if you studied for a while and normally understand the topic. Many students experience nerves or anxiety when taking a test. Feeling nervous has been proven to affect a student's performance for the worst. Students panic if they run into a question they aren’t sure of the answer to which decreases their score even more. 50% to 80% of test scores were fluctuated and had nothing to do with the actual growth in learning of a student. This shows that tests are an unfair analyzation because the scores are not accurate.

The infamous standardized exam is a consistent tool used to measure all students on the same scale to get the most accurate results possible. The standardized tests have been becoming the number one thing that colleges look at when looking at an applicant’s form rather than the GPA like in the years before. The reason for this is because in modern day high school the GPA isn’t that accurate because now there are a variety of different courses you can take as well as teachers that are stricter than others affecting the “measuring stick” like in the standardized exams. These tests are also used to determine if a child has learned the basic skills and material to pass on to the next grade seen in grade school. An option presented by anti-standardized test associations are teacher made tests and assessments. The biggest problem with this is that “teacher graded assessments are inadequate alternatives to standardized tests because they are subjectively scored and unreliable.”(Procon) This is 100% true because a teacher can give their assessment to the students and have no idea what level they are at and the students are without a doubt going to fail the test. Standardized test are perfect because these tests are prepared by months and months of handouts around the tests. Therefore the students will have an idea what they are

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.