Do standardized tests have a place in today's educational systems?
Many people would probably argue that, yes, standardized testing serves a large purpose in keeping track of a child's progress in school, and they also serve as a tool for measuring a child's aptitude. Students, on the other hand, do not agree with those individuals. Why is that? Could it be that students in schools today just hate the idea of testing, or is the problem within the subject matter and the feeling that these tests do not measure their ability to perform within a subject? From my experience in America's education system, I can relate to both scenarios. Taking a test for a whole class period is definitely not fun, and for me it was always met with unfathomable boredom. As a person who really enjoys learning, I feel as though that is time I will never get back. But why should the practice of standardized testing be discontinued?
School has become less about learning and has become more about learning how to pass a test.
Quarterly analysis exams, or known as "Benchmarks" where I went to school, have become the most common standardized test to track student progress. Throughout middle school and high school, my teachers would be lecturing and would come upon a part of the material where they would say, "this will be on your benchmarks. Make sure to remember it." What kind of message does that send? Yes, my teachers were just giving me a heads up so I wouldn't flunk my benchmarks, but it also reinforced the fact that the other subject material we were learning is of less importance to our education. These quarterly analysis exams also attempt to gauge how well an educator is performing, which is incredibly unfair. A teacher's performance in educating students is measured by the students' performance on standardized exams. That sounds fair, right? Even though that does sound like a viable way to evaluate teacher performance, there isn't always a margin of error included such as: students with testing anxiety, students who have home-life issues that may cause them to under-perform on tests, and students that may have focus related illnesses. Numerous teachers could lose some salary or their tenure as a result.
Standardized testing does not accurately measure student aptitude.
Within each subject, there are multiple facets that are presented. For example, math has many different areas of the study. There is geometry, trigonometry, algebra, calculus...you name it! Though there are many different disciplines within a subject, not every one is covered in these tests. There are random questions from different subject matters, and sometimes they miss one whole section altogether. The issue with that is some students may thrive in one part of a subject but not meet expectations in another. That isn't an accurate representation of their abilities and skills.
These tests cost BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars each year.
Most standardized test are not controlled by the state's board of education. Our education departments funnel millions of dollars each year into paying private testing companies to create, grade, and record tests and test results. Why should we funnel so much money into these programs that do not have truly accurate results? Many former employees of testing agencies have reported that they are not even trained properly to grade thee tests that have the power to hold a student back.
What are our possible solutions to these problems?
The first objective is to be more involved and informed on how your state board of education implements testing policies in your local schools. It is easy to turn a blind-eye to this problem if you are not experiencing it, but you can make a much bigger difference than you think. State-level solutions involve cutting unnecessary testing of students, balancing budgets to include less privatized testing, and learning to derive statistics from class grades instead of standardized test grades. Standardized testing puts too much extra stress on students and teachers, and is effectively killing the ability and the incentive to obtain knowledge in the United States.
