The Negative Effects Of Standardized Testing In The United States

In recent years testing has been a huge component of public education in the United States. Students take year long classes and then are forced to take long exams based on what they have learned. The problem with this is that many of these classes don’t provide students with the tools that they need to function outside the classroom. It is true that some of these classes are necessary and need to be taught, however, this is not the case for all of them. Standardized testing needs to be re-evaluated and replaced with more beneficial ways of teaching students information.

This quote gives a great sense of the way most of the American public feel about standardized testing, especially the two groups who are most affected by it, teachers and students. This huge emphasis on standardized testing over the last fifteen odd years, since the introduction of No Child Left Behind in 2002, has entirely altered the way teachers teach and students learn. There is no doubt that there needs to be a system of assessing students at the end of the school year if the United States plans on moving toward a system of national standards, like Common Core. The current system is ineffective and does not actually assess what students have learned, but rather what they have memorized. For example, when millennials are asked what they learned in high school they are more likely to say “the mitochondria is the power house of the cell” or, instead of actually being able to explain what the mitochondria does.

Is standardized testing an effective measure of student achievement? The No Child Left Behind Act was made to close student achievement gaps by providing all children with a fair and equal opportunity to obtain a high-quality education. Every year students are required to take multiple standardized tests such as the end of grade, or end of course, exams along with the SAT or ACT. Although schools measure their student achievements by standardized testing, students do not always meet those standards. This is not an accurate measure of student achievement.

Adequate Yearly Progress only focuses on if the student is proficient at the time of the testing. This is a disservice to students and teachers because you are doing all this work to take a Standardized test. Standardized testing can create a lot of stress for both educators and students. A student with a 4.0 must pass all four standardized tests in order to graduate. That causes a student a lot of stress with all the hard work they do during the years it seems like a waste when it comes down to a test to graduate it can be very discouraging.

Teenagers go through a lot; as stated before, they are at a fragile age with hormones and all. Pressure flows in on them from friends, family, sports, academics, etcetera. We should relieve the pressure of academics just a little bit by lightening the homework and classwork loads. Spending seven hours a night on homework after a seven hour school day is not everyone 's ideal afternoon. Or, like Botstein had suggested in his article, we could have high school start after sixth grade and go through tenth grade.

State standardized tests are exams students take to assess their schools, teachers, and what they learned in their year. Many parents and teachers deem these tests useless and see it as an unnecessary stress added to their child’s life. Students should not be taking this exam because it causes a major curriculum gaps between students, causes stress and loss of interest in school, and after almost a full year of learning, this test is supposed to determine a student 's knowledge of the year’s curriculum. Although some say this test prepares students for college, the stress and loss of interest in school caused by this test and test prep can affect student’s mental health and grades. State tests cause stress and anxiety in students, especially lower performing students because of the pressure of making sure all students, regardless of ability, reaches the same level.

Standardized Tests are ineffective because they don’t measure what is important. Other people may think that we don’t take enough tests. The text stated, “We need a lot of tests to figure out how smart people are getting.” This all may be true, but, parents are complaining that the teachers are “teaching to the test”. Other people may think that we don’t take enough tests while some parents are complaining about all of the testings.

According to Huffington Post website it says that from a recent survey the NSLA did, it said that teachers have to reteach stuff when summer break ends. Another survey was done by the teachers they found out that 66% of the time teachers have to reteach stuff from the last year for 3-4 weeks and 24% of the time teachers have to reteach stuff 5-6 weeks. Johns Hopkins was studying Baltimore schools and they found out that there was 2 months loss of reading performance while it was summer break. The students that are going into the incoming grade forgets the math skills that they did last year. NSLA surveyed the teachers and they said that students could go to summer school to prevent student forgetting what they learned that year (Klein).

Going into highschool, usually students tend to have a difficult time still being close with their old friends and begin to drift away. In middle school I made friends and I stuck with them for the rest of middle school. Coming into high school my old friends were in a different building or attended a different class and I was scared of making new friends. After a while of getting used to the school I made friends with people who went to the same middle school as me which made it less scary. More often than not students fear the cafeteria and I as a freshman had that fear because it was filled with different grades from 9th to 12th graders.

We Should Start School Later It is 6:00 am, most high school students are either up or waking up and getting ready for school, knowing that they have a bus to catch at 6:40. The kids cannot stay attentive and cannot focus because they were up late studying for that important test and now they are going to have problems focusing and concentrating during school that day. Teens need more sleep.

The author appeals to emotion in the heading “Placement tests are “hidden standards”. The heading explains that if a student misses just one year of mathematics then passing the college placement exam will be difficult. The director of the Transition Mathematics Project Bill Moore said “Sometimes students are pushed too hard and too fast. They rush through the curriculum, they take their senior year off, they take a placement test - and have to take remedial math”. He understands that if students are failing they have to recover quickly and it may cause them to not understand the concept and they may end up taking “remedial math” because they were “pushed to hard and too fast”.

tandardized Tests Should NOT Be Mandatory Thousands of teenagers per year are turned away from the college of their dreams because their SAT scores were not high enough. A lot of students’ plans are ruined because they didn’t score well on one of the mandatory standardized tests. In high school, students can be forced to repeat the grade if they don’t score high enough on standardized tests. After high school, they can be denied by colleges because they didn’t score well enough on these tests. Standardized tests are an unreliable way to measure a student’s intelligence level.

The problem is they want students to take a variety of standardized tests to determine if they pass. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was created to allow no students to get left behind. This act required students to be tested in math and English every year starting in third grade. The new Common Core curriculum has set standards to help prepare students for college and the real world. In some states, certain students could get opt-out of testing.

The College Board SAT has received many mixed reviews from fellow students, parents, and even teachers about its effectiveness for college admission. The SAT writing portion in particular affects juniors and seniors who are thinking about and applying to various colleges and universities. Generally speaking, when junior year rolls around, the stress and anxiety builds up when preparing for these standardized tests. Many, including myself when I went through the process, worry about the preparation needed, strategies needed to be learned, and ability of whether or not one is able to sit through the dwelling three-hour exam. In addition, we must take into consideration that some people naturally test better than others on these types of exams.

Welcome to the age of testing, where standardized tests reign supreme in the classroom. Today, schools religiously use standardized tests as a tool to measure success. Every year a new set of standards are released because the test scores the year before were not adequate. Leaving teachers and students under pressure to perform better. The pressure to do so well has led to cheating scandals and school districts scores being eliminated.