As students head back to school this year, they will be decorated in new apparel and fresh supplies, but one thing that will not be new is the amount of standardized testing they will be met with. Since 2002 the United States has seen the amount of standardized testing increase rapidly; with each year brings more money spent and more tests administered. It has been concluded in a study completed by the Brown Center on Education Policy that on average, 1.7 billion dollars is thrown at the standardized testing initiative each year, solely in the United States of America. While the data may claim to track students and hold education systems accountable, while still exclaiming to be conclusive and fair; other forms of concrete data are revealing …show more content…
It is estimated that 1.7 billion is spent on testing annually in the United States, now this money comes from the pockets of taxpayers and is spent on the testing. So if this money is coming from the people of the United States, one would think it would be invested into accurate testing to act as a reference for where are students are at. But, if these test results are indeed not accurate, what is the point of millions upon millions of dollars being invested into an endless circular process? Doing well on a standardized has little if any correlation to true mastery of a topic, or more crucially a student’s ability to apply the concepts to a real world setting. Standardized testing displays a student’s ability to sit in a crowded, distracting room, stay focused for the test’s duration, and use portions of their encoded memory to recognize an answer from a list that may be the correct one. In order to fulfill George W. Bush’s dream of evolving into an educationally competitive powerhouse, the United States must use the taxpayer’s money for something relevant and truly revealing. Also, if decided to continue our standardized testing habits, there must be a push to make the questions rigorous enough to gage proficiency, yet inclusive enough to be a realistic marker for all of our
Last week President Obama announced that he believes the school in america should have less standardized tests. President Obama says “students are spending too much time in the classroom taking tests, many of them unnecessary, and urged officials in the country’s schools to take steps to administer fewer and more meaningful exams.” The white house agrees by saying “a problem the administration acknowledged it has played a role in — has taken away too much valuable time that could be better spent on learning, teaching and fostering creativity in schools. To curb excessive testing, Obama recommended limiting standardized exams to no more than 2% of a student's instructional time in the classroom.” This would allow the student to spend more
Proponents see standardized testing as a way of making testing more efficient and effective by minimizing cost and increasing people’s accountability for their performance in the system. Opponents on the other hand argue that the systems has limitations based on its very nature on what can be tested and as a result of these standards needing to be met sacrifice some very important aspects of students education experience as well as force onto students and teachers a one size fits all model that has failed to deliver on its promises. After having reviewed all the evidence in detail it becomes clear to me that standardized testing is not an effective system for educating students and does more bad than good
Standard testing is a very controversial and important subject because it deals with the progression of the American education system. The practice of these assessments has been highly scrutinized not only for the way it has changed the format of classrooms, but also for its accuracy, pressure, and abundance. In 2001, standardized testing became federally mandated through the No Child Left Behind Act by former president George Bush Jr. According to research from the Council of the Great City Schools, students have been taking “an average of 113 tests from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade” (K. Hefling). These numbers have increased to the point where parents have opted for their children to not attend standardized exams.
In America, there is quite a lengthy history of standardized testing. It all began in 1838 when the American education system began to form ideas of having tests that would be transformed into formal measures of student academic achievement. They were originally created to hopefully show student improvement and academic knowledge, which is also their most common use up to today. The commonly dreaded standardized test, the ACT, was created in order to help more colleges improve their enrollment numbers, and colleges needed a new standardized test in order to do so. But lately, these forms of standardized testing seem to be causing damage to students.
The idea that one test can accumulate all of one student’s academic abilities is no longer accurate. Today, the standardized tests that are used not only discriminate against the non wealthy families, it also is not an accurate reading of all of one’s abilities in and out of school. The tests also have become such a huge focus in the classroom that it is beginning to take away the process of learning in a classroom and being replaced with memorization to get good test scores. The standardized tests do not need to disappear all together, however the tests need a lot of revising if the states continue to use them as they do
Standardized tests are very common in today’s modern society. They are used as a tool to measure a person’s performance and indicate how their estimated performance will be in a college class. Every year hundreds of students take the ACT or SAT in order to get accepted into their college of choice and to receive scholarships, but they fail to see the problems with these standardized tests. As more and more people take these tests, the national average score falls causing doubt in the extremely important system. This is leading people to question whether or not the ACT and SATs are accomplishing what they were created to do.
The state of Texas has been in a constant struggle within itself over just how to evaluate education, and standardized testing in Texas has been a major influencer in terms of the state’s standards for over thirty years. Though these methods of testing have been utilized for decades, resentment to the tests have been continuously rising among educators, parents, and students, but not everyone agrees. Despite government officials trying to quell these protests with changes to administration, and the way the test itself is formatted and formulated, there seems to have been little to no improvement made and those opposing the tests have started calling for an end to all standardized testing. For one to truly understand this ongoing struggle, one must first look at standardized testing’s beginning, then how government today is trying to fix the broken system, and finally consider the opinions of notable figures in the testing world.
All students dread one thing when it comes to school - testing. Standardized test are the main focus in our school systems instead of actually gaining knowledge at the end of the year. As a mother, Michelle Rhee, understands the lack of attention given on education as a whole instead of just waiting on the scores, but she still agrees on continuing with standardized test. Kristina Rizga opposes the opinion of Michelle Rhee as she does not believe standardized test truly measure the intelligence of a student. Kristina Rizga proves her stand against standardized test by utilizing solid use of argumentation.
Standardized testing has become one of the most popular types of testing in U.S. public schools to date. Students take numerous standardized tests throughout their childhood schooling. (Studies show that a typical student takes an average of 112 mandated standardized tests between Pre-K and 12th grade.) While standardized testing is one of the main procedures that Universities use to judge incoming students, it is not proven to be the most effective way to convey a student’s actual intelligence level. The U.S. should not focus so heavily on standardized testing because it is not a complete accurate measurement of a student’s intelligence.
Increasingly today in America’s school system, there is a recognition of tension between individuality and conformity. The struggle between students’ personal needs and the needs of the whole continues to grow. This can be seen though the controversial issue of standardized testing. These are tests that are designed in a way, which are administered and recorded in a consistent method. In standardized testing, all test takers are required to answer the same set of multiple-choice, true or false questions, short answer, and essay questions.
Introduction Standardized tests may be used for a wide variety of educational purposes. For example, they may be used to determine a young child’s readiness for kindergarten, identify students who need special-education services or specialized academic support, place students in different academic programs or course levels, or award diplomas and other educational certificates. Thesis Statement Standardized tests should not be eliminated completely, but should rather be evaluated in addition to other factors such as grades, extracurricular activities, and volunteer hours. This would take pressure off of students during standardized tests, allow colleges to see how well-rounded the students are, and give students who are better in other areas
While there are many upsides to standardized education, there are also a lot of negative factors to take into consideration. One such factor is the cost of standardized testing. In order to comply with federal regulations, states must create exams that test the national standards. Since this is a huge undertaking, each state will contract a testing expert, such as Pearson, to create and print the exams (Chingos, 2012). In fact, around $4 billion “dollars in annual global sales comes from [Pearson’s]
Schools can now exempt students in each grade level from standardized tests so that teachers can expand on new and diverse topics, students will have a better chance of proving their knowledge with more class discussions, and students of all races and abilities will be able to show their understanding of the material in different forms. To conclude, standardized testing scores are never accurate and students do not take them very seriously. Standardized tests do not measure a student’s abilities, because in this new generation, students are finding more creative ways to show their understanding of a
The United States then encountered a newfound necessity: the ability to assess the subject knowledge or aptitude of an extremely large group of people in a quick and accurate manner. To solve this problem, American organizations turned to standardized testing. It was here in the 1940’s and 1950’s that standardized tests began their widespread use in determining the outcomes of numerous American examinees each year.
This statement reveals that standardized testing is the only viable and realistic approach to acquiring data about student learning. This data can be easily and effectively compared against itself to determine an increase or decrease from prior years, or against other districts to determine the relative health of a school system. Without standardized testing, policy-makers would rely on teacher grading, of which Phelps claims is "more likely to be idiosyncratic and