The Effects Of Standardized Tests On Education Essay

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he is fed for a lifetime. In today’s society, education is very similar to this statement. Schools are commanded to teach aspects of life that only benefit the student for an end-of-the-year test. Students are not taught what is to come in the life after school. Because of the poor quality in education today, the emphasis on standardized test has become overwhelming.

Standardized tests are exams that are supposed to measure a child’s academic knowledge but have long been a controversial subject of discussion. Although it is one method to see how a child is performing, is it the best method? Standardized testing can be biased or unfair, inhibit both the teacher’s and the children’s creativity and flexibility, affect funding for schools, cause untested subjects to be eliminated from the curriculum, and cause anxiety for children and teachers.

Standardized tests are unnecessary because they are excruciating to the minds of many innocent students. Each year, the tests get tougher and stricter until the students cannot process their own thoughts. The tests become torturous to the minds of those only starting in the world of tests. The students already battling in the war are continuing to fall deeper and deeper into the world of uncreativity and narrowness. As the walls narrow in on them, they are lost and unable to become innovative thinkers. Moreover, the implementation of standardized tests into the public school systems of the United States of America has controversially raised two different views –the proponents versus the opponents in the battle of the effectiveness of

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.

The purposes of standardized tests are to instruct decision making, establish program eligibility, evaluate course goals, evaluate program goals, and examine external curriculum. When a teacher gives and assesses a standardized test, they gain information about their students that helps them realize what concepts they have learned according to the agenda for the subject at hand. If the assessment is performed in a sensible amount of time and given according to the directions, this purpose should be fulfilled; however, it is a common belief that standardized tests do not work well in establishing where a student stands in a specific curriculum. The test uses a general curriculum that is the basis for the tests

In classrooms all across America, students sit perched over their desks in the process of taking standardized tests. As the students take the tests, teachers pace nervously up and down the rows of their classroom, hoping and praying that their students can recall the information which they have presented. Some children sit relaxed at their desks, calmly filling in the bubbles and answering essay questions. These children are well prepared and equipped to handle their tests. Other children, however, sit hunched over their desks, pondering over questions, trying to guess an answer. They struggle to recall information that has been covered many times in class, but they can’t.

“No issue in the U.S. Education is more controversial than (standardized) testing. Some people view it as the linchpin of serious reform and improvement, others as a menace to quality teaching and learning” (Phelps). A tool that educators use to learn about students and their learning capabilities is the standardized test. Standardized tests are designed to give a common measure of a student’s performance. Popular tests include the SAT, IQ tests, Regents Exams, and the ACT. “Three kinds of standardized tests are used frequently in schools: achievement, diagnostic, and aptitude” (Woolfolk 550). Achievement tests can be used to help a teacher assess a student’s strengths and weaknesses in a

Standardized testing has invariably been a controversial concern when evaluated by the general public. To advocate standardized testing, separation between students is promoted. School systems are becoming more corrupt and with mandatory testing, injustice is allowed to be processed throughout the nation. Standards that are constructed by standardized testing for students should be diminished or repealed from the educational system. Students are used to accumulate data by taking required tests such as the American College Test (ACT), Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) , Independent School Entrance Examination (ISEE), or the High School Placement Test (HSPT). Depending on the scores generated by each individual student, a ranking system is molded

“Standardized testing has become the arbiter of social mobility, yet there is more regulation of the food we feed our pets that of the tests we give our kids ” (Robert Schaeffer quotes)

Standardized testing is a down fall to many students but also an opportunity for many others. Standardized testing has its pros and its cons. It can be the make it or break it factor into getting into colleges you are hoping to attend or the scholarships you want to earn. Some people may have their opinions about the test, whether they hate it or not but the fact is that it’s here to stay.

The educational system in the United States has gone through many changes over the last century. These changes are a part of a constant movement toward educational excellence for every child in this nation. One of the most recent acts placed on public school systems by the government is to create more accountability for schools in order to ensure that all children are receiving the proper education. Part of this mandate is that public schools will require students to take tests in order to gather information about their academic achievement. Although educators and administrators claim that the mandatory ability testing programs being initiated in America’s public schools will hold students and teachers accountable for academic

“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.

A very current and ongoing important issue happening within the education system is standardized testing. A standardized test is any examination that's administered and scored in a calculated, standard manner. There are two major kinds of standardized tests: aptitude tests and achievement tests. Standardized aptitude tests predict how well students might perform in some subsequent educational setting. The most common examples are the SAT’s and the ACT’s. The SAT and the ACT attempt to estimate how well high school students will perform in college. But standardized test scores are what citizens and school board members rely on when they evaluate a school's effectiveness. Nationally, five such tests are in use: California Achievement Tests,

For about the first 25 years of your life you are prepared and conditioned to be successful, through a long series of lectures, essays, and tests. There are the ordinary subjects. The things that we are told make up our world from arithmetic, to science, to literacy. In this factory we call school lessons about each of these topics are hard at work attempting to manufacture and academically intelligent student. But there's a problem. We are forgetting to focus on key social and emotional characteristics that make the difference of survival in this “dog eat dog world.” Sure curriculum directors sprinkle them here and there into the strict code they’re programming, but we treat these vital characteristics as an afterthought. That is why I believe

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.” Education is teaching the whole person; not just the intellectual side, but also the social and emotional side. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is the process through which students gain the skills necessary to recognize and manage all their emotions, build relationships, solve interpersonal problems, and make effective and ethical decisions. The significance of SEL continues to grow in the context of policy debates concerning school improvement and individual student achievement. A review found that SEL programs improved students’ performance in the classroom, not just their emotional performance. Specifically, they found an increase of 11% to 17% in test scores (1). SEL has just recently made it into mainstream educational curriculum, but at many schools, including Stevenson, they haven 't found an efficient way to asses the SEL standings of individual students. Tools to assess social and emotional competency is broad and includes instruments that look at population-level changes in social-emotional constructs, program outcomes, and process outcomes. The measures come from multiple frameworks such as youth risk and protective factors and youth developmental assets. We must identify key assessment tools for evaluating changes in social/emotional well-being of the students. Overall what