Using Money to Motivate Higher Test Scores

Whether we realize it or not, test scores play a vital role in many people’s self esteem. A person who frequently scores high will be confident that they are very intelligent and will expect others to see them that way. Asimov attested to this when he stated, “All my life I’ve been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I’m highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think that too.” (Asimov, 536). On the other hand, those who score low on tests often write themselves off to be unintelligent. Emphasis on the importance of the ACT or SAT test scores can lead an adolescent to conclude that he or she is not capable of succeeding in college and lead them to not pursue higher education. The tragedy is that we may pass on opportunities because we have labelled ourselves unintelligent based on a test score which is not a true refelection of our

Additionally, Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” There are different forms of intelligence that go beyond what our school system measures. Students are not a unit to be measured, and students cannot be assigned a numerical value to identify their intelligence. Students are diverse—they learn at different speeds, and they learn in different ways. Focusing solely on test scores is hurting our students and deviating away from building our society on success and excellence. Critics are slowly realizing the problems associated with standardized tests—they create anxiety, they are extremely biased, and they do not measure the ability to think deeply.

Similarly, many teachers, statewide, feel that these exams that no significant value towards a student’s overall intelligence. According to a survey by both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Scholastic, of more than ten-thousand public school teachers, this report has found that teachers

Standardized testing has been around since the early 1900’s. Today, it determines a high school student’s future. Every year juniors in high school start to prepare months in advance for the SAT’s and ACT’s. Along with the test itself, comes stress that is not necessary. The debate of standardized tests defining a student’s academic ability or not has become a recent popular controversial topic. Many colleges and universities are starting to have test optional applications because they are realizing that a single test score does not demonstrate the knowledge of a student. There is more value in a student that should rule an acceptance or rejection. In the article, “SAT Scores Help Colleges Make Better Decisions” Capterton states, “The SAT has proven to be valid, fair, and a reliable data tool for college admission” (Capterton). Capterton, president of the College Board, believes that the SAT’s and ACT’s should be used to determine a student’s acceptance because it is an accurate measure. What Capterton and deans of admissions of colleges and universities don’t know is the abundant amount of resources upper class families have for preparation, the creative talents a student has outside of taking tests, and the amount of stress they put on a 17 year old.

Parents and professors speculate why children no longer display excitement and ambition for learning. Most share the common goal of educating the youth to take on the “rights and responsibilities of citizens” (Ravitch 109). Unfortunately, educational requirements have strayed from the original purpose and began to aim their attention toward the “importance” of standardized testing. As a current high school senior, my experience has been that students are branded by their grades and test scores as if they determine who we are as a person. Diane Ravitch’s “The Essentials of A Good Education”, successfully critiques the extensive use of standardized testing in order to pursue change in our education systems and prove that focusing on test scores corrupts a child’s inner creativity.

With standard grading processes on the school level, motivation for sufficient learning is advancement and graduation from that educational branch. Except in cases of completely deteriorated motivation from the student, typically culminating in said student dropping out on their own accord, this incentive to complete the curriculum typically maintains student motivation. The shortsightedness of such testing is the assumption of a unified degree of student motivation, especially at the high school level (Forte, 2010). Standardized tests administered to student at this age group are frequently low pressure and low stake. Because the tests pose far less consequence to the student, and motivation for students can occur on such a wide spectrum, test results become far less uniform than expected (Ryan, Ryan, Arbuthnot, & Samuels, 2007). When applied to a common, realistic scenario, the model begins to break down. For example, an unmotivated student would characteristically perform poorly on a test. When the scores are returned, however, the school is still expected to facilitate this student’s learning in order to resolve the previous score, following the trend of school culpability. Due to differing degrees of motivation, the test results therefore possess a significant potential for ambiguous validity, which subsequently requires filtering of test results to stabilize the statistics (Wise, Wise, & Bhola, 2006). To filter

How far a student can go in life is already pre-determined by the generation before him. Success is no longer made up of solely intellectual ability, but rather if the streets the student walks through is gang-ridden or not, if their parents are absentees, and other conditions in which the child grows up in. Valerie Strauss expresses these concerns in her article, “What the Numbers Really Tell Us About America’s Public Schools” in which she discusses how income levels correlate with students’ success rate which is further accentuated through Kamiak and Mariner High School’s Standardized Test Results. “Motivation, a Major Factor in U.S. Student Test Performance” by Dian Schaffhauser continues this idea of external problems affecting low scores

Writer, Anne Stuhldreher, in her persuasive article, “They Earn as They Learn,” suggests that a financial incentive program in schools can lead to improvements in student performance on standardized test. She supports this claim through an encouraging anecdote recounting the positive progress a student has made due to the program, then she introduces the favorable observations made by a teacher employed at a school piloting the program, and finally by presenting the compelling beliefs and statistics provided by a principal, whom has witnessed student progress. Stuhldreher’s purpose is to persuade the readers to agree that paying students to perform well on exams can improve overall academic achievement. She adopts an optimistic tone for Americans

In the society of today, there are various educators who believe in assessment as proper method to measure the performance of a child in school as well as the overall achievement of a specific school system. The assessment may be presented in the form of verbal, written, or multiple choice, and it usually pertains to certain academic subjects in the school curriculum. Recently, many educators began to issue standardized tests to measure the intelligence of a common student body. (Rudner, 1989) These standardized tests were initially created to reveal the success in institutional school programs, and exhibit the abilities of students today. The standardized tests can reveal the strengths and weaknesses

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.

The focus is to tease out underling issues that separate the education level between impoverished and more affluent families so that everyone has access to the same education. Furthermore, the authors wanted to see what it would take to get the “underachievers” to succeed and stay in school versus giving up on their education. With help from the Griffins, the authors conducted their first experiment to incentivize students to do better in school so as to keep them from dropping out and encouraging them to continue with their studies. The experiment involved giving students who maintained certain requirements such as high grades, no excused absences, and no behavioral issues a monetary award. In doing so, Gneezy and List were hoping to nudge students to care about their education. The end result of the experiment aided in facilitating 50 borderline students out of 400 to meet specific achievement standards. The authors also discover that student’s performance increased slightly if their parents received the monetary award rather than the students. I believe this incentive structure nudges parents to be more concerned and involved in their child’s efforts to perform better in

There are many different types of standardized tests used in schools around the country, but “high-stakes” achievement tests in US elementary and secondary schools have produced

Should we pay children for achieving good grades? In my essay I aim to give you all the positives and negatives of the above subject. My personal opinion is, of course, students should be paid, as my belief is that we would concentrate more in school - I will however leave that outcome up to you. If students in St. Andrew’s and many other school across Scotland and the U.K were to be paid for better grades, they will want to do better in school.

Visualize a standardized test taken annually by millions of students in the U.S.A. that directly affects teaching methods, school budgets, and grade promotion. Presently, millions of schools are utilizing high-stakes tests to determine these major factors. The United States expects students to perform well on standardized testing, or school districts will suffer financial consequences under the No Child Left Behind Act (Au 502). This places pressure on everyone from administrators to students in a school district. Schools worldwide are stressed to succeed on these standardized tests when they only measure a fraction of a student’s intelligence. Standardized testing must be discontinued because it negatively affects school curricula,