Standardized Testing and its Victims

Students everywhere are being victimized by standardized testing. Such testing does not accurately measure a student’s intelligence or academic achievement, and deprives students from exposure to a complete subject matter curriculum. Standardized tests are meant to test the knowledge of students across America on a same scale and subjects. The exam is presented with equal scoring and interpretation and gives students equal opportunity to show what they know and how much of it they know. Standardized testing is the most commonly used method of testing in the United States and often the most important factor in determining a students’ intellectual ability, and even his future outcome. However, these exams cause harm to education quality and rather than serve as reliable source of a student’s achievement, growth, and progress, standardized testing promotes inequality and a hindrance to education.

School Standards and Altered Teaching

Beginning with the No Child Left Behind Act test scores have become a crucial determinant of how much funding a school will receive from the government, based on how well schools do in achieving the set standards. These benefits were supposed to result in less wasted time to teach the information needed. If teachers know they will be held accountable for how their students perform on standardized exams, then they will be less likely to avoid material that will appear on the exam. If a school fails to deliver an education met by the requirements of standardized testing then the poorly performing school may be forced to closed or taken over by the state. standardized test scores have failed as a measurement of learning because teaching to the test testing dominates curriculum instead of intellectual content.

When classrooms are driven by testing, test score gains cannot represent a corresponding growth in the domain of knowledge that tests are supposed to sample and measure. A recent study found that teachers have started planning their curriculum around state tests. The purpose of educational testing to teachers, parents and others is to evaluate the level of comprehended material students have received in respect to a body of knowledge. The amount of material and skills taught by teachers is too vast to test everything. Instead, standardized testing is used to sample the large bodies of material learned.

The problem that occurs with this process is the teachers are beginning to teach material that appears on previous exams in order to ensure that their students score well on tests. However, the standardized test becomes useless if the content of a subject as a whole is not taught. When teachers teach only the sample of the content tested, they are depriving their students of a full understanding of the material or skills. A student’s test score would no longer indicate knowledge of the content tested. Therefore, valid inferences disappear as a consequence of teachers “teaching to the test”. Likewise, another problem arises when teachers plan curriculum around standardized testing. When teachers spend time teaching students material specific to the test, they cut out an abundance of regular curriculum based days.

Preparing for standardized tests has consumed classroom teaching itself. For example, former Texas State Senator Ted Lyon found that high school students in Texas spend between 29 and 45 days a year taking tests. In Tennessee, students spend six weeks in testing a year, and California’s students spend four. The preparation for tests also can be a massive time consuming commitment…“When New York City’s scores dropped in 2010, many schools added two­ and­ a ­half­ hour test preparation sessions daily and additional test practice over holiday vacations, according to local papers.”. Preparation for an examination is not a bad thing, however, when a single student spends hours on end studying for one particular test, he or she is deprived of further learning of other crucial subjects.

Cheating and Testing Misconduct

There is often a presence of cheating when it comes to testing. Recently there has been a drastic increase of cheating and score manipulation since standardized testing has become important. Adjusting scores and test difficulty in order to give an appearance of educational progress has become very common. Rather than teaching material to allow for student comprehension, officials often lower required passing standards on tests. School districts have become so desperate in their want to obtain high test scores that they have even started forcing students to repeat grades in hopes that their scores will rise the second time around.

Schools nowadays also have labeled some students as having some sort of learning disability in order to allow the student to take the test in a secluded room away from peers in hopes of the student receiving a higher grade. Cheating on standardized testing has also appeared on a much larger scale. The largest cheating scandal in recent history was discovered in Atlanta during the 2012­-2013 school year. “Over the past decade, students in Atlanta had shown more highly improved test scores than in any other district. But evidence of a wide cheating conspiracy invalidated those scores and left administrators with little idea about how effective instruction had been over those ten years”. Cheating on these tests is not localized either. In 2013, education research organization FairTest published a list of confirmed cases of state test score manipulation in at least 37 states and Washington, D.C.

Artificial Intellience

Standardized testing also fails to capture the full spectrum of students’ knowledge and academic capabilities. Students are not taught to think critically for these exams. Instead of measuring content, standardized test scores measure superficial thinking. In a study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, elementary school students were classified as “actively” engaged in learning if they asked questions of themselves while they read and tried to connect what they were doing to past learning; and as “superficially” engaged if they just copied down answers, guessed a lot, and skipped the hard parts. High scoring test takers on two established standardized tests were more likely to be from a pool of students who exhibited the superficial approach to learning rather than the students who engaged approach. Therefore, standardized testing is also not a reliable process in determining student success as it is intended to. A high­ stakes, standardized measure is imposed as the sole criterion for judging student success, it replaces existing content or performance standards. However, if standardized tests are truly evaluating test taking abilities rather than academic capabilities, then alternate educational performance by students should be taken into larger account. Ultimately standardized testing does not accurately evaluate a student’s knowledge and should therefore not be required.

No More Testing?

So where do we go from here? If not standardized testing, then what? The recurring argument here is that we need standardized testing because there is no fit alternative to accurately measure student achievement. This is completely false. There are many alternatives to demonstrate student progress, alternatives that are less intensive than a standardized test, less time consuming, less ‘teaching to the test’ oriented, and possibly more accurate than standardized testing. The only thing standardized testing does is promote improper teaching methods and competition among students. So how can a parent be sure that his or her child is receiving the proper education? Let’s weigh the options…

Back in the days of elementary school, parent/teacher conferences were the only way that let a parent know how his or her child was doing in school. Parents would meet with their child’s teacher once or twice a year and hear about how the student is progressing throughout the year. Teachers know best, they spend everyday with students for an entire year; they observe, direct, and manage a students’ progress. So if there were one way to measure student achievement, it would be through the word of a teacher. But, just like standardized testing, parent/teacher conferences have flaws of their own, the major one being teachers giving false information about the students’ progress to make them look better towards the administration.

Standardized testing hinders educational practices and priorities. These tests have been used to make the major decisions about students’ educational progress and higher grade evaluation.

These testing methods should not be used to determine the future of a student, especially when these exams do not accurately measure a child’s full spectrum of knowledge. Standardized testing also promotes ‘teaching to the test’, which diminishes an accurate education for students. Although standardized tests set a bar for a national education, the implications of these tests are far more harmful. Therefore, standardized testing should be updated, or revised, to a more reliable way of evaluating a student academic achievement.