Essay Testing in Educational Facilities

Although standardized testing has been a major part of schooling it has also had a negative impact on effective education. Standardized has made a huge impact on public schooling so much that not only does it affect the students but also the teachers. With the teachers now beginning to get raises or having their jobs on the line if their students fail the test, many students have not been getting the fullest education process that they could get. Students may not realize the impact that it has had on the type of teaching style that they receive because they are so used to it. With so many teachers not having a lot of time to teach what is on the test and the other things that they feel are important to students to know, a lot of

Getting an education is the main goal for everyone, although it is easy to obtain there are some obstacles to it. One of the main obstacles students face at the beginning of their education is standardized tests. Schools have started to adopt this type of tests as their main way to evaluate students’ intelligence and teachers’ effectiveness to educate the students. The way students used to learn has changed, in order to get them ready for the tests they have to spend much of the school time preparing for it instead of learning something they can use in their future life. According to Bruce Jacobs in No Child Left Behind's Emphasis on 'Teaching to the Test' Undermines Quality Teaching, a 2007 study by the University of Maryland teachers were put in much pressure and had thoughts to teach the test […]. This shows that teachers have also been affected by standardized tests in a way they have more pressure to make students pass. Having teachers ‘teach the test’ means their way to educate has been corrupted. In most cases when teachers’ ability to educate has been changed leads them to practice methods not convenient for scholars. One of these methods is memorization, in Relying on High-Stakes Standardized Tests to Evaluate Schools and Teachers: A Bad Idea by Hani Morgan describes how students start to adapt to an “inferior type of learning, based on memorization and recall students gain when teachers

Standardized testing is not an effective way to test the skills and abilities of today’s students. Standardized tests do not reveal what a student actually understands and learns, but instead only prove how well a student can do on a generic test. Schools have an obligation to prepare students for life, and with the power standardized tests have today, students are being cheated out of a proper, valuable education and forced to prepare and improve their test skills. Too much time, energy, and pressure to succeed are being devoted to standardized tests. Standardized testing, as it is being used presently, is a flawed way of testing the skills of today’s students.

Aleah- I like your post because I also don’t understand why testing has so much influence on certain outcomes like the money received from colleges, teacher evaluations and etc. Especially since not everyone is a good test taker and a lot of factors can cause someone to do poorly on test like not eating, not enough rest the night before or worried about something

Yes, tests are an important method to evaluate a student’s performance. In fact, tests demonstrate a student’s progress in the class, demonstrating what the student knows or does not know. It is the result or the outcome that needs modifications. After a paper or test or project is submitted to the instructor for assessment, that paper or test is given a value or a number based on the quality of the work, and this is the problem. This creates the illusion of learning because the end goal circulates in obtaining a high grade, not learning. In Pippin’s article concerning grades (352), she asserts, “students may be working hard for a hard grade and not for deeper learning. The interest is in the reward of the grade, not the

“According to a review of testing research that has been conducted over the past century, over 90% of students have found that standardized tests have a positive effect on their achievement. Students feel better about their ability to comprehend and know subject materials that are presented on a standardized test. Even if a perfect score isn’t achieved, knowing where a student stands helps them be able to address learning deficits.”(12 Advantages and Disadvantages of Standardized Testing). This shows when students are pushed to their limits and they have been working hard in a certain subject they are prepared for test . Teachers in this situation are put to a test also (“Good teachers understand that test preparation drills and specific core instructions to “teach to a test “) . Teachers are put to the test by whether or not they can push students to their best ability to pass the exam. Students and teachers are given the same amount time to teach a specific subject and get judged off of it . This goes back to say all of the stress put on students and teachers is unacceptable because students and teachers should not be judged off of a test

School testing is a very controversial topic. Many people believe that SOL testing is useless and unnecessary, while others believe it is very helpful. In “Problems With Standardized Testing” by Jasmine Evans, she states the issues and irregularities that come with testing. She explains how the stakes are too high, pressuring students harshly: “That pressure to succeed creates a poor environment for learning” (Evans par.

President Bush is promoting annual standardized testing for all students in grades three through eight in order to assess their academic achievements. This bill is currently being considered in Congress, and has garnered much support from individuals in the community. As of right now, fifteen states test students in those grades, and more than twenty have high school exit exams.

In the United States, standardized testing is being used everywhere around the country. There has been controversy on whether it is actually an effective way of testing. These tests are deemed to be important to schools, since teachers spend countless hours trying to get students to master what will be on the test. This interferes with engaging lessons in which students spend less time learning and spend more time memorizing. These tests require a certain amount of hours to be taken, which interfere with valuable class time. Not only do these tests do absolutely nothing except restrict the learning environment of a student, they are inequitable, they don’t adequately measure a student's

Could something that is widely believed to be helping students actually be hurting them instead? Standardized tests are these tests are becoming an increasingly popular way of testing students and teachers in the United States. Though it does have its perks like every students being treated the same, and the ability to compare data, standardized tests put too much pressure on students and teachers, are unfair, take valuable time away from learning, and are a terrible way of evaluating and measuring students’ abilities. For these reasons, America should get rid of these pointless and ineffective tests.

This situation does not set students up for success. There is also the problem of “…overemphasis on standardized testing (that) has ‘caused considerable collateral damage in too many schools, including narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, reducing love of learning, pushing students out of school, driving excellent teachers out of the profession and undermining school climate’” (Parents4PublicSchool 1). When schools, students, and teachers focus so much on standardized tests that it reduces the love of learning, decreasing the love of learning in both teachers and in the students. When a student is forced to learn inside of the box and do not have the freedom to add extra tidbits of fun, it reduces the love of learning. When the curriculum is narrowed, a teacher does not have as much room to add in things that will increase the love of learning in students, either. Because of all of these things, a student will not be as ready for college because instead of being prepped for things that would be necessary in college, they are being taught everything aimed at the test just so that they can get into a college. Even if a student does well on the test, there is always the chance of not doing well once in college. The test was not made to be used to figure out college readiness, it was meant to be used as an

Some say that testing is a good way to hold teachers accountable for the failure or success of their students. They believe that test scores show if the educator is teaching effectively or not, but the two are not always directly correlated. Often a student’s performance on a test has little to nothing to do with their instructor. Some students are simply better test-takers than others and do not even attempt to do well on exams. Teachers should not be held accountable for the laziness of a student. Even if a student does do well on a test, it does not mean the teacher’s methods were effective. Because standardized tests are not accurate measurements of students’ abilities, a student who naturally excels at language skills, for example, could do extremely well on a test even though their teacher was not very effectual at their job. These people also say that standardized tests do not produce an overabundance of stress in students. As a student myself, I can say with certainty that this is not true. Testing has caused a great amount of stress for people I know and me personally, I am sure that other students would support this as

According to Diane Ravitch, the author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, after the No Child Left Behind Act passed, there began to be a lot more focus on teaching students how to be efficient test takers. In turn, knowledge has become second to test-taking skills (Ravitch 107). Edward Davis, the author of Lessons For Tomorrow, said “Kids are taught how to outsmart tests by recognizing trick multiple-choices” (Davis 95). There becomes more and more evidence proving how much curriculums at school are becoming centered around what will show up on the test (Ravitch 16). This causes students to learn only the basic facts and questions on the test rather than being encouraged to think and explore other ideas and concepts. Lynn Olson, author of Study Questions Reliability of Single Year's Test Score Gains, said in a study, “... 50 percent and 80 percent of the improvement in a school's average test scores from one year to the next was temporary and was caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning or productivity” (Olson 9). This shows that according to the study, tests are not helping students overall to improve their knowledge and learning. The knowledge teachers put into

Do standardized tests destroy schools and fail prepare students for the real world? Our teacher’s spend time on memorization of specific words that will be on the state test, not vocabulary building exercises. They have pep rallies and time spent away from lesson plans to learning cheers on how the students are going to do well on the test. Excess teacher and administration time is spent figuring out game plans, not for teaching students, but for figuring out how to increase test scores. Meanwhile, when a student is truly excited about exploring a topic in depth, they are shut down because there is no time to learn, only time to work on memorizing items that might be on these test. Standardized tests waste classroom time and do

Standardized tests do not asses skills when their questions are generalized for an entire population. Most of the time, the tests are not in conjunction with classroom skills and behavior. These tests asses for general knowledge and understanding of students rather that their actual abilities. Since the questions are general in nature, it becomes very difficult for teachers to know how to improve the students understanding of a particular subject based on just general information. This leads to teachers “teaching to test” rather than educating students in a proper way based on the real needs of the classroom. Another reason these tests do more bad than good is the fact that teachers actually have a test booklet instructing them on what to do if a student vomits during a test. Students study so hard for these tests and simply cannot handle the pressure. So in the end, their final scores reflect not their abilities, but the influences of their surrounding factors instead.