Standardized testing has become a very controversial topic amongst the nation. There are two sides, one that agrees that these tests are doing well for students and school officials, and another that argues that these tests are hurting the students taking them and should be put to a stop. Norman R. Augustine wrote an article for the need of standardized testing, and Jessie B. Ramey States the ways that the tests are impairing the learning capability of the students. Norman uses three arguments that people opposing the standardized test would most often use. The first is that these test encourages the teachers just to “teach the test”, but he ensures that, this is exactly what the teachers should be doing.
In today’s educational setting, teachers must teach according to a strict curriculum, following a timeline of when to teach the lesson, how long to teach it for, and how to teach it. At the end of each lesson, a test is given to the students, and then a new lesson begins, pushing the previous lesson out of the brain probably never to be used again. Better yet, these lessons that are being taught by teachers are not showing up as frequently in standardized testing. Instead, these focus more on logic, strategy, and time-management, or how fast one can finish a test. Unfortunately, while some kids can prosper under timed conditions, many are not good at multiple-choice only tests, and they are frowned upon for low scores.
With the use satire, people have been made famous through this literary work. Many would laugh about the subject of standardized testing. What is the point? Through the use of parody and low comedy, The Simpsons satirizes the judging of standardized tests in the episode “Standardized Testing.” Although everyone in the world has disparate views on educational systems, we should see all aspects of it together. The pragmatic way of seeing the positives and negatives of standard testing comes from the background information we observe from it.
This helps determine how a child is doing academically. On the other hand, the opponents of this idea believe that standardized test is inadequate as an educational evaluation tool. They maintain that the multiple-choice format that is used on standardized testing is seen as an insufficient tool for assessment, and instead, encourages a simplistic way of thinking, where there are only correct and wrong answers that do not seem to be applicable in real-world situations. Also, such a format is biased towards male students, who are found to adapt more easily to the game-like point scoring of multiple-choice questions. They put forward this argument also because they assert that standardized testing can be wrongfully used as a center of debate to fuel political agendas.
This means that, even if a student may not know a skill at the time of the test, it doesn’t mean that they will never know it. Unfortunately, standardized testing only gives a rough estimate of what a student can do or knows. It is impossible to tell if a student will improve, or even tell if the student just guessed on all of their answers for the test. This explains how standardized tests do not measure the correct information that school’s are actually searching
This is a good point and it is awesome to have easy accessible grades but this only proves our laziness to put easy to read grades over meaningful and truthful ones. If the grade that you see is the true representation of the understanding and knowledge on that topic then it is definitely a worthwhile one. “Proponents argue that standardized testing is the most efficient method of assessing the performance of students and institutions and of maintaining the quality of education.”(Standardized testing).Standardized testing may be the most proficient and the best looking test scores but that does not mean that they are the best for the students and how the teachers teach the students on the topic. These testing methods often sways teachers just to teach according to what’s going to be on the test but this is not good because there is much more understanding outside of the test. Sometimes tests only show a small portion of what is being teached and don’t truly test kids on their understanding but what they can pick from a little multiple choice bubble.
Since the introduction of standardized tests, we have seen a larger focus on trying to catch everyone up to the ability to take the same test. This has made teaching nearly impossible, since now teachers are teaching a sliver of the class what they really need to learn and because of this and the barriers that students face, “U.S. students slipped from 18th in the world in math in 2000 to 31st place in 2009, with a similar decline in science and no change in reading” (Shatzky). Students are no longer being taught how to learn and how to critically think, and are instead taught how to take a test because although we see a decline in the rankings of the world; the test score averages have increased over time. How is it that we as a country are falling in rank, but increasing in test scores which should reflect an increase in
However, the standardized tests is a process which recognizes three levels of citizenship education outcomes: first, understudies capacity to examine social circumstances related to citizenship values; second, the degree to which students are able to work cooperatively and show inquisitiveness and third, the degree to which students demonstrate responsibility to each other and to the community (outcome related to understudy and teacher involvement in decision making) (De Ketele, 2000). Moreover, they claim “standardized tests causes undue stress for the students; but it helps them grow such positive behaviors as cautious work, self-discipline, persistence, and
"Contrary to popular assumptions about standardized testing, the tests do a poor job of measuring student achievement" (Harris 1). Standardized testing cannot accurately show the academic abilities of a student. Standardized tests only measure a fraction of what a student has
These exams have changed the way that children are taught, and have made public schools int a limited learning environment. In fact 70 percent of educators surveyed in 2015 say that tests are not developmentally appropriate. Furthermore many students suffer a great deal of stress because of standardized tests.What’s most shocking is that instead of lower income schools getting better after tests were implemented they have actually gotten worse. School could essentially be taught by robots. At this point most teachers in my district have to teach a curriculum that is developed by the state instead of their own curriculum.