High Stakes Testing Effects

Furthermore, if year-round school was established, teachers will not be under as much pressure, which could impact the number of days they take off work positively. With year-round school teachers will have to spend less time reviewing and more time teaching lessons required by the government. Teachers need to follow guides and requirements for the classes they teach. They often feel rushed in teaching all the required information in one school year because of the time spent reviewing forgotten information (Priddy). Teachers are also pressured to cover certain lessons and topic for each grade.

Class ranking is a mathematical summary of a student’s academic record compared to those of other students in the class. It usually considers both the degree of difficulty of the courses a student is taking (AP, honors, college-preparatory or regular courses) and the grade the student earns. The selection of courses and grades are converted to an overall grade point average (GPA), and the higher the grade point average, the higher the student’s class ranking. Most small private and competitive high schools have stopped recording class rank because they feel it penalizes many outstanding students who are pushed out of the top ten percent of the class and then overlooked by elite colleges. Although most public high schools still rank students,

One might say that it is a students choice to drop out or not, but many students dropout of school due to peer pressure and some students may feel like they are not good enough just because they can not catch up to the academic level of their peers because they were absent due to their suspension or suspensions. Therefore students who are suspended have a harder time catching up to their academic level and often dropout for this

Why the SAT and ACT Tests Should Be Banned Every junior’s worst nightmare, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT ) and American College Testing (ACT). It’s such a stressful test where you have to cram everything you have learned throughout middle and high school into one standardized test to determine your college entrance. Many students do not perform well on standardized test which pertains only of general knowledge which is unfair to many students. The students should not be penalized for poor test taking skills, stress and anxiety which may cause them to score low. College admissions should not be determined mostly by a test that does not measure a student’s potential and work ethic.

Students don’t test for one day, they test for a week and a half. There is a lot of questions on the test you might not know the answer to. That might stress out a lot of kids. I know this because the author of Standardized Testing: Good and Bad stated testing can put too much stress on kids, parents and teachers. I agree with her that the teachers, parents and the students might end up having a negative view toward the school after testing.

Today alone 7,000 high school students have dropped out. That’s 1 student dropping out every 26 seconds adding up to 1.2 million dropouts in the U.S. this year. 38% of those students say it’s because of their poor grades. These people can become homeless and have a much more difficult life than most of us can imagine. Even if they are lucky enough to secure a job it will usually have a much lower pay than a graduate.

Starting 7th grade in a secondary school can be a horrifying experience for any 12-year old. Going from a piddling elementary school to a voluminous secondary school can be tough to adjust to, especially if you have an IEP. Having an IEP has always made me insecure about how I perform in school. I feel as if I am not as smart at the other kids, and most people don’t understand. Many people don’t know what an IEP is and I fear that when I tell them they might think I’m dumb.

Over summer break the majority of students don’t do anything academically related which causes the dreaded summer brain drain. Summer brain drain is the act of students losing their knowledge priorly gained in the previous school year. On average 67 percent of teachers spend the first quarter of school reviewing and reteaching what students should already know from the previous years (Flemming, Nora). Studies released in 2007 by the Ohio State University show that there is no real big difference in the students learning compared to those students in traditional schools, The National Summer Learning Association cites decades of research that shows that it can take teachers anywhere from eight to thirteen weeks at the beginning of the school year to reteach students so that they are up to speed and ready to learn new materials (Lynch, Mather). Schools use standardized tests to record brain drain.

(1) Standardized Tests Are Ineffective Standardized tests in elementary and secondary schools are ineffective because they aren 't taken seriously, don 't accurately portray one 's intelligence, and they change the way students view themselves. When students take standardized tests, many don 't take them seriously which affects the data collected, creates a lack of school interest, and increase of stress. The purpose of standardized tests is to evaluate students individually and as a whole through academics. When students don 't try their best, their full capabilities and knowledge aren 't reflected by the test scores collected making it hard for educators to gage what needs or doesn 't need improvement.

All students want in school is to get good grades and sometimes they will get desperate and being desperate leads to cheating. When students cheat all they think about is getting a good grade most of the time. Other students don’t care about school and they cheat. This can affect not only the student his/her self if they get caught but it can affect the class and how other students learn, because if one student sends out a test or homework than other students will have it and then pretty soon most students will have it and not have learned anything. There’s is no conclusion to cheating, because no matter what, students will cheat weather they know if it 's right or wrong.

Every year over 1.2 million kids drop out of high school in the United States. One fourth of kids will fail high school in their life. Nobody seems to question why these students are failing, other than that they are not trying hard enough. America 's grading system is flawed compared to the rest of the world, and there is many ways this problem could be fixed. Getting a zero and an assignment drops the final grade on a subject massively, and getting an F means the same score.

States that have Common Core implemented have seen a decline in student test scores and achievement. This is shown in one of the states with the earliest implementation of Common Core, Kentucky. Kentucky has seen a decline in their student achievement since the implementation of Common Core. This shows that Common Core needs significant improvements, or needs to be removed completely. One parent stated that “Our children who were testing in the 80th or higher percentile in math last year, are now coming home with C’s, D’s, and F’s on their report cards” (Lamoreaux).

Passing a standardized test should never be a high school graduation requirement. Tests are difficult for people with test anxiety, tests don 't cover everything students know or need to know, and test graduation requirements will cause teachers to only formulate lessons based around the test criteria. Test graduation requirements could be one of the worst things we could do with our education system If passing standardized tests were a graduation requirement then people with test anxiety would have a great disadvantage on the test. It is said that as much as 40% of children have test anxiety (half of which have an extreme case).

This research seeks to improve attendance among students at Second Start Alternative High School. Many students are not receiving academic credit due to their lack of attendance. The target problem is defined as frequent absenteeism. Students who are not accomplishing an attendance rate of eighty-five percent can be determined as frequently absent. The objective of this study is for students to attend school at least fifteen school days in a seventeen day period.