Why are standardized test unnecessary?
If you were asked to remember how many standardized tests you took throughout your entire life, what would your answer be? Too many to count? What if you were asked how much of that information taught to you to pass these standardized test do you actually use throughout your daily life?
Standardized tests are given out to students every school year to determine their level of education and their placement for the following year. The standardized test is now 150 years old to the United States. These tests are also used in order for schools to receive federal funding. schools use externally mandated written examinations to assess student progress in specific curricular areas in the pre-civil war times.
Nowadays whenever a school standardized test scores are legitimately high, administrators will be convinced that the teachers in the school are doing a swell job in teaching these students, but if a school’s standardized test scores are poor then administrators will believe that the teachers aren’t doing their jobs in teaching students in passing these standardized tests. The standardized test became more common with the introduction of No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, which stated that if schools didn’t perform well on these tests, they could be restructured, taken over by an outside agency, or, as a worst-case scenario, closed. This is the reason why teachers stress so much over all their students passing the standardized test.
Students come from different levels of proficiency and have different cultural backgrounds. Standardized test treats students as if they were all identical in every way. All students are different and learn at different paces; they shouldn’t be forced to take a test that might make them seem “unintelligent” because they didn’t learn as quickly as all the other students did to meet a standard. For example, if you tell a monkey and fish to climb a tree the monkey will do it with no sweat but the fish will feel dumb for the rest of its life just because the fish does not have the ability to climb a tree as well as a monkey.
Following these reasons further, teachers only teach what is considered to be “necessary” to pass the test. Therefore, if there is an opportunity to learn something about real life that can help anyone in the future, and it’s not on the test, teachers are not going to teach it. Every student has had a different teacher throughout their life, and those teachers each have a different way of teaching; they all have their own style of teaching. Standardized testing has not improved student achievement for many years. Students try very hard to study for a standardized test and once they finally get the test after all the hard studying they’ve done, their mind goes blank. Some of the information needed to pass the test is not even taught in the classroom. This information is thought as common knowledge when that isn’t the case.
STANDARDIZED TEST: is a practice by which exams are administered and scored in a uniform way, meaning they are administered and scored in the same way in every school and classroom. These tests are used to gauge student learning and hold schools and teachers accountable for student success. The standardized test became more common with the introduction of No Child Left Behind in 2001, which stated that if schools didn’t perform well on these tests, they could be restructured, taken over by an outside agency, or, as a worst-case scenario, closed.