What Are The Pros And Cons Of Standardized Tests

Depending on how desperate a teacher is for good test scores, inappropriate preparations can be made before testing, sometimes even to the point of cheating. While having standards and a uniform teaching model, high -stakes testing is generally detrimental to the education of America. The importance of these tests has become the be-all and end-all of high school. The accountability of the testing will follow the student throughout his or her educational life. Despite being held in such high regard, the high-stakes testing effects are far from the desired and predicted

It is sad that the stigma that comes from not doing so well on intelligence tests is that the certain individual is “dumb” or “stupid” when that is not what it means at all. When people hear the term learning disability, they think of it in a more negative way than it actually should be viewed. There is no definite cause of a learning disorder and just because one may have one does not mean they cannot function the same as others. The percentage of people with learning disabilities is increasing. Also, another thing that stood out to me was how many intelligent tests there really are; I always thought there was just one main one that everyone took.

One of the biggest flaws is standardized testing has not improved student achievement. " Despite using them for several decades, policymakers and educators do not yet know how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement and to improve education." So if these tests aren’t improving our students, then why do we have them? I believe we need to change the tests or improve them somehow so that we do see some sort of improvement. Tests are very crucial to education because they show what a student knows, if we took these tests out completely then we would have no idea if students are improving or declining.

Standardized tests can also motivate teachers to be

One of the most stressful things of any high school students career is taking the SAT, or the ACT. There are advantages and disadvantages of both tests depending on your abilities. For example, the ACT test questions are more straightforward ,whereas the SAT questions take a little more thought to understand what the question is saying (Princetonreview). On the other other hand, the SAT test is given in ten sections that revolve around subject areas, and the writing portion is given at the beginning of the test. The ACT writing, which is optional yet required by a lot of schools, is at the end of the test and could be a disadvantage if you are feeling very tired.

Education is a right given to all Americans. What would you describe a right that is taken a way? Unjust, something that is not moraly right or fair. If a test is given to students that is proven to be biased, unreliable, and counted towards college admissions, that is ample amount of evidence to prove it to be

To begin, standardized testing puts a lot of unhealthy stress on students and gives them even more problems to worry about. Many students find standardized testing to be extremely stressful and can lead to faulty habits. According to the author Quinn, Mulholland: "One student couldn’t handle the stress of all of these tests and broke down in the middle of one. “She had a complete meltdown,” Neely-Randall told the HPR. “And I could do nothing to help her, I couldn 't help her with the test.

Leslie Rayburn is a teacher in Santa Cruz, California, and she, too, believes that this is unfair to students, and to teachers who are graded based on their students’ grades. She explains that, ‘the children who perform poorly on multiple choice standardized tests (but perhaps might perform well on an open-ended form of test) are labeled as “less intelligent’ and the school suffers” (Rayburn) Since progress of a student is mainly viewed based upon the outcome of standardized test scores, the lower-performing students are seen as “not college- ready”, which creates a roadblock to a student about where they may want to attend college. The fact of the matter is that no two students are the same, learn the same, or test the same, so standardized tests are inaccurate measurements of a student’s full learning capability and

Secondly, it is necessary to establish the usefulness of looking at a district or state by examining standardized test scores of an area 's students. While there is inevitably a population of students who simply do not do well under the stress and time constraints of standardized tests, this is not a valid objection to determining the condition of a school district by looking at these scores. Margaret Spellings, the US Secretary of Education in the Bush Administration from 2005-2009, describes standardized testing as "a valuable part of the educational process" and that it "lets teacher and parents know how kids are doing and lets students see the rewards of hard work" (Use of Standardized). Here, Spellings shows the necessity of testing in schools. In addition, a testing scholar and economist, Richard P. Phelps argued that while standardized tests do not create perfect results, they are used because they "provide information whose benefits outweigh any cost and imprecision" (Use of Standardized).

The fact of the matter is that standardized testing does not infer much about the intelligence or progress of a student. First, “For decades, critics have complained that many standardized tests are unfair because the questions require a set of knowledge and skills more likely to be possessed by children from a privileged background” (John 2000). In other words, privileged students have more available resources to achieve higher scores on these tests. This is especially true for high stakes exams in which well-off students have access to tutors and the latest study guides and textbooks to help them prepare for the tests. Furthermore, social-economic status in general has a great effect on the test scores as “Research has repeatedly found that the amount of poverty in the communities where schools are located, along with other variables having nothing to do with what happens in classrooms, accounts for the great majority of the difference in test scores from one area to the next” (Kohn 2000).

All the pressure and anxiety students go through trying to pass those tests, it’s terrible. Standardize tests are an unreliable measure of one’s performance. Test scores can’t measure learning or tell someone how smart they are. These types of test are some of the main causes of students cheating off someone they want to believe is smarter than them. Another reason students drop out and/or give up on themselves is because they scored badly on a test.

This aspect has resulted into a decrease of time spent in the recess. As a result, children’s’ emotional, social, and academic well-being is compromised in the long run (Ricci 351). Moreover, the fact that the federal funds are only availed to schools which meet specific thresholds, have put schools under pressure to ensure that their students can meet the requirements through standardized tests. As such, schools spend much time evaluating the students’ performance such that whenever “the students are not sitting for the standardized tests, then they are being prepared to sit for the tests” (Kohn 47). As a result, students skip or neglect other important activities such as extracurricular activities such as games in order to prepare adequately for the

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 issue isn’t simply that testing cripples students’ self-esteem and subsequent passion toward their own education. The issue is that these harms are the results of testing which doesn’t even measure real-world skills or