OPINION
Has Standardized Testing Helped You?
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A picture of an answer sheet for physical versions of standardized tests.
Throughout the years, you’ve probably taken a lot of tests. Formatives, quizzes, tests, midterms, AP exams, finals, and state tests are the main types that most Grandview Heights students will take throughout their high school experience. While these tests can give teachers an idea of what prior knowledge a student has, the amount of attention done in class, or understanding of the content, it is not a true insight into the student’s actual amount of learning.
Starting in China before becoming prevalent during the Ming Dynasty, standardized testing has been a pervasive fact throughout history. During the Industrial Revolution, more people went to schools, and standardized tests became more prevalent as it was an easy way of assessing the larger group of students. Standardized tests spread to America in the 1800’s when school reformers Horace Mann and Samuel Grimley Howe came to Boston, and implemented them. They’ve become more and more pervasive throughout the years, with the SAT starting in 1926, and the ACT starting as a rival to the SAT in 1959. In 1938, test scoring machines were invented, which worked by finding the electrical currents in graphite marks.
Governmental testing standards became a lot more intense in 1965 with President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). With the ever-increasing panic about the low numbers in education coming to a head in President George H.W. Bush’s America 2000 plan, whose plans were interrupted by President Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000 Act and Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA). These governmental mandates led to teachers teaching to the test, because it was beneficial for them, and it seemed, for the students.
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002 increased the lack of actual education in favor of good test scores, because bad ones could lead to a teacher being fired, or even a school being closed. Throughout the years since, educational standards have grown higher and higher as the state's standards increase, and it has led to a debate about the actual benefit of standardized testing.
Standardized testing offers many benefits to a whole host of people. First of all, it can help teachers find gaps in their curriculum, and it can reward them if their students consistently get good scores. Secondly, it can help parents, as it can give them an insight into their child's standard of learning in a way that grade inflation might prevent. Next, it helps government officials as they attempt to revise educational policies in order to make them more relevant for students' education. And lastly, they help colleges know how ready applicants are for that next step in their lives.
Some of the other benefits are that it is an equal way of measuring students against each other. If student A gets a 40/60 on the test, and student B gets 50/60 on a test, one can likely conclude that student B was more prepared for the test. One other benefit is that it is an easy way to measure a student's growth over the years, because if you take the same test every year, and are consistently getting higher and higher scores, then it’s likely that you’re making actual growth. One last benefit is that it prepares you for the stressful situations that most people will face further on in their lives.
If you look at it closely, you will see that just about none of the above reasons mention any actual benefits for students. The only real benefit is that it gives government officials numbers on education, but the numbers tend to not actually give any insight into the students' level of education.
Standardized testing also tends to measure a district's wealth rather than the standard of their education. The rich get richer because they have more access to ‘better’ education, and the poor get poorer because they don’t have those same resources. These rich schools focus on test taking skills instead of actual content, because standardized tests don’t really ask questions that require creative thinking or problem solving abilities. Standardized tests also tend to discriminate against minorities, because the tests depend on one class's set of background knowledge, instead of having a more diverse set of ideas.
Standardized testing also creates the problem of teachers teaching to the test, which is taking the content that the state requires them to teach, and pretty much only teaching that, rather than what might actually help the student develop skills later in life. These exams can also change a student's faith in their ability to learn, if they get either a disproportionally high or low score.
One of the biggest problems with standardized tests is that it only happens for a few days out of the year. If someone is going through something on that day, their score could be much lower than it would’ve otherwise been, which can affect their future test-taking skills and performance, starting an academic downward spiral. If a student is on their period, has lost a family member recently, is facing a lot of distraction in the classroom, or is in pain from an injury, they’re likely to have a lower score than they might’ve otherwise.
Overall, standardized testing is an unfair method of measuring student performance, as there are a multitude of factors other than the raw score that cannot be taken into account when evaluating a student, teacher, or school. They should be either abolished or revised in order to make them more beneficial for everyone involved.