The Metamorphosis : The Misunderstood Of Students

Standardized testing is suppose to benefit a student in many ways but a lot of kids don’t feel like it does. Some students have fear taking a standardized test. Those kids who make good grades but get usually get nervous before tests, normally struggle while taking their exam. Many times it causes students to stress and feel overwhelmed distracting them from their grades. (Ms. Moore), a teacher in Ohio believes that, “you don’t teach kids to perform well on standardized tests, you teach kids to learn, to enjoy learning and to not treat it as such a negative. When did learning in America become a negative?” (Analysis; Pros & Cons). Though education isn’t always fun, it shouldn’t cause students to stress over a test score. It also makes students give up once they know their test score is low.

Standardized testing has been ruling over the lives of students, making or breaking them in their education without fair judgement. Tests like the SAT and the ACT count for way too much when applying to colleges, which in turn limits the student 's capabilities to thrive in an environment that would benefit them. There are many problems within a standardized test that deems them to be unreliable as a true test of knowledge. Although designed to test groups of students on intelligence, standardized testing neglects to fairly acknowledge the abilities of each unique student which reflect their true capabilities.

Schools all over the nation have introduced standardized testing as a way to evaluate what the students have learned over the course of the school year. Exams can be administered online or on paper, depending on the subject. Test can be taken at different points of the school year; results can be used as a way to determine what areas are weaker than others. Most results are viewed by the school board, administrators, and teachers. In some schools students take one end of the year test with different subjects, other just takes one test. These tests can be graded by groups of people are computers. Standardized testing has become a part of America’s educational system and many don’t see the benefit of the test at all.

The use of standardized testing to measure students’ knowledge is an inaccurate reflection of their capabilities. By being forced to take a test that does not effectively show their abilities, students become overstressed, and the tests themselves do not promote true academic achievement. Rather than learning about subjects in order to gain knowledge, students simply memorize facts and formulas to get a decent test score. Standardized tests are not an appropriate measure of student performance, only benefit certain groups of students, and do not prepare students for the real world.

While in high school, many students complained about standardized testing and how ridiculous it was our education standards were on the line for it. How we never learned anything long enough to remember it. Students are supposed to enjoy learning. Instead students dread their mornings and hours spent in a classroom. Pass the OGT or the new PARCC testing in order to graduate. Being taught at an impossible pace that many cannot remember the information for the next year but instead just remember for the moment. There are teachers who are sitting fancy, but don’t even do their job to the core standards.

Standardized test cause reduced content knowledge. In other words, teach the test criteria and nothing more. The scores that everyone is trying to get only give a person a small amount of the knowledge that, without the test, they would obtain. Theses scores are drilled so hard into a student’s head that they do not know any other thing to do than to pass that test. Barber states in his article that there were three groups of people, elected officials from the school board, the press, and the public. He said that “All three groups were clamoring for something simple and repeatable to use to judge how well their schools were doing.” He goes on to say that they thought standardized testing was just that. They wanted to compare other schools to their school, that it gives them those bragging rights. This will eventually create a ripple effect, and come back on the schools in harmful ways.

Students spend a lot of time stressing over standardized testing when they could be focusing their energy on more important academic and social activities that could benefit them in the future. Standardized testing are stressful for students for one that it is timed, students often times can not focus knowing that they have a certain amount of times to take this very important test. And if they start stressing out from not having enough time left then they are gonna start writing or bubbling in random answers and then that can cause them to do worst. Teachers are being told to “teach the test”,the teachers don't want to teach us the same basic things every year, but if they don't then students will be unsuccessful when it comes time to taking the exams. Which can lead to consequences ad problems for both the student and the teacher. Some of those consequences may include students being held back, teachers getting in trouble or possibly loosing their jobs because they have failed to meet the standards set and what people think students should learn and what type of material the teachers should teach.” Brain research suggests that too much stress is psychologically and physically harmful. And when stress becomes overwhelming, the brain shifts into a “fight or flight” response, where it is impossible to engage in the higher-order thinking processes that are necessary to respond correctly to the standardized test

Evaluating individual students through standardized tests is a poor means and should be replaced with performance-based assessments. An average student spends most of their early life inside a classroom, submitting to a sequence of tests and preparation for further exams to finally graduate and continue with further education, constantly struggling and striving for the highest marks. Through a strict series of standardized tests however, students instead form the idea that there is a single answer for all of the problems that face our world.  You are taught not to think logically or creatively at all, but to mindlessly memorize. As a student, you lose interest in the different disciplines you

Students are spending increasing amounts of time preparing for and taking competitive standardized tests. Standardized testing has been a controversial subject of discussion. This does not improve student achievement or teacher performance. Some are for these tests because of how it provides students, parents, and the government with information on the student's progress. Although most schools make students take standardized tests, it does not measure the knowledge of a student, causes disadvantages for students and teachers, and can be bias or unfair.

For instance, “A June 2006 Public Agenda survey of 1,342 public school students in grades 6-12 found that 71% of students think the number of tests they have to take is “about right” and 79% believe test questions are fair” (Education Insights). This shows that many students believe in the idea of these tests. These tests also create a harder way for teachers to be biased against students due to the machinery grading the tests. These tests seem like the easiest and fairest way to go when including the idea that all students would be tested over the same curriculum and the same questions along with the same time allowed and creating a harder way for students to cheat. For example, It prevents subjective grading. This helps eliminate marking bias and ensures rationale behind each test question” (“Pros & Cons of Standardized Tests”). This is also one of the easiest ways to test such a large crowd. The ACT and SAT are the fastest, easiest and most cost efficient forms of standardized test that examine students on their current level of education on behalf of their acceptance into those colleges. These test are able to test students mental strength and endurance. These tests are still being proven to this day why it is still the most used testing form word wide.

“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.

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.

Overall, standardized tests are being used to make educated decisions they should not make, causing stress on students and their teachers and ignoring differences in learning styles. As a result of decisions being based on one test score, students stress to do well on the test. Everyone does not comprehend the same information the same way or at the same pace. As an alternative there should be a test based on each child’s reading and comprehending skills, not the same test for every

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.

To begin with standardized testing creates several critical problems for students and for the education industry. These tests are created to test over particular things. In the end these types of tests are only limited in the amount of knowledge that can be tested toward students. For example, “Standardized exams offer few opportunities to display the attributes of high-order thinking, such as analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creativity.” (“Standardized Testing Has Serious Limitations”). Even though these tests are able to attack certain subjects at the core, they still leave out very valuable and critical information that all students should know. In