Standardized Testing Hurts Everyone

Standardized Testing Hurts Everyone

By Jayden
Grade 7

Larry Strauss, most notably known as a figure who worked in many fields of literature, academia, and education, once stated, “Standardized testing has sucked the life out of learning. Stop focusing on test scores.” The United States is educationally behind other developed countries throughout Europe and Asia. A proposed idea to solve this issue is to increase standardized testing. However, statewide testing should not increase in the U.S. because it doesn’t fully reflect student capabilities, can take a toll on teachers, and can be an unfair metric for teacher evaluations.

First, statewide testing doesn’t reflect all the students’ academic and critical thinking capabilities, due to outside factors. For example, Britannica states, “Standardized test scores are easily influenced by outside factors: stress, hunger, tiredness, and prior teacher or parent comments about the difficulty of the test, among other factors.” (Britannica). This quote shows that, despite their original purpose, standardized test scores can be affected in many extraneous ways that don’t reflect how well the student is doing academically. In other words, standardized tests are limited to only academics and not what happens outside of school, which makes them highly volatile. In addition, Edweek states, “Though tests can help gauge whether a student might need remediation when they get to college, the format of some tests—which expect students to answer dozens of questions in about an hour—may primarily evaluate ‘how well you perform under pressure,’ Clemons said.” (Edweek). Subsequently, even if standardized tests can be helpful for gauging some aspects of intelligence, they fail to reflect a student’s thinking, creativity, and some facets in academics.

Furthermore, the addition of increased standardized tests can take a toll on teachers. For instance, Edweek details, “Nearly 80 percent of educators said they feel moderate or large amounts of pressure to have their students perform well on standardized tests.” (Edweek). With increased standardized testing, this already large sum of educators can increase. With this come many disadvantages, such as increased amounts of homework and classwork and, possibly, a significantly more rushed education to cover required topics. To add on, Greater Greater Washington elaborates, “Some DCPS teachers have estimated their students spend more than 10% of the school year taking mandatory tests. Mangiaracina told the SBOE that students at his school, Brent Elementary, are tested once every 11 days. That’s about twice as much as average.” (Greater Greater Washington). With a further intensified amount of testing, teachers will have to rush through many of the significant topics in subjects to stay up to standard. Therefore, this can pressure them heavily and even harm students’ education. Consequently, increased statewide testing can significantly harm and take a toll on teachers.

Lastly, standardized tests are unfair metrics for teacher evaluations. Britannica states, “As W. James Popham, former President of the American Educational Research Association, notes, ‘standardized achievement tests should not be used to determine the effectiveness of a state, a district, a school, or a teacher. There’s almost certain to be a significant mismatch between what’s taught and what’s tested.’” (Britannica). Standardized testing often has some topics that aren’t covered in school, making it ineffective as an evaluation of school performance. Consequently, it makes increased testing irrelevant as it can’t be a correct evaluation of students. Furthermore, Rethinking Schools expresses, “Standardized tests are also too crude to account for the possibility of cognitive transfer of skills that students learn across different subjects” (Rethinking Schools). Cognitive transfer skills are how students understand and apply what they have learned. Standardized tests don’t account for the many ways students learn and are taught. This makes them an insufficient way to evaluate students, which makes increased testing useless.

Now, many people may think that increased testing means increased study, which means a better outcome for students. However, it also means that teachers will be pressured into keeping class material up to date with the testing dates. Thus, some important lessons will be rushed through. This can substantially impact a student’s education as they may have gaps in their education that may impact them even greater when they build on these learned ideas in a higher grade. Another defect of the statement is that students may be pressured to study more for tests, which could be helpful, but also takes time away from “kid life” and family time. Without this time, kids may have a smaller bond with their family and friends, which can lead to a lack of social skills later on. All in all, more increased statewide testing may not affect students right now; however, it may definitely come back around and impact them greater later on.

In conclusion, there shouldn’t be an increased amount of standardized testing across all 50 U.S. states because they don’t reflect students’ capabilities properly, take a toll on teachers, and are unfair metrics for evaluations. The future is in the hands of these students, and if there is increased standardized testing, its defects will harm both the students and teachers, so we may as well have diminished our future generations. If this were to happen, would this be the academic world you want?