Standardized testing plagues the world and although it was created to showcase a student’s academic knowledge of material learned throughout a course, it only considers how the student performs on that single, given day and not the student’s history of coursework. These exams implement stress on students, and the teachers drill information into their students to prepare them for these exams all year. Final exams are supposed to let the student know how well they have mastered the topic; but do finals really test how well a student knows the subject? When it comes to taking standardized tests, there have two different types of students.  Students can either be a good or a bad test taker; some students who perform well in the class itself might not be the best test taker, and vice versa. Standardized tests force students to think one specific concrete way to get an answer. Standardized testing should be eliminated from the curriculum set forth by the state because it does not show the true potential of students or how well a student has mastered a topic.

According to Chris Carter, “Studies strongly suggest that standardized tests fail to measure the qualities that are truly important, reward the ability to adopt a superficial style of thinking, and may in fact penalize many of the candidates with the deepest minds.”  This is because standardized tests force students to think one specific way to get the answer. After multiple years drilling this same method of thinking into student’s brains, it starts to mold the way a student will think on everyday problems like how a potter forms and molds his clay. The result of this is that the students who think openly and creatively are quite often condemned because that way of thinking is frowned upon in the standardized testing world. Furthermore, Adam Zyol composed a poster illustrating things wrong with standardized testing. In the picture he composed, it shows a young student with his head open and a hand holding a cube with scantron bubbles and the words “standardized test” written on it. The hand holding the block is trying to force it into the student’s head. At the top of the poster it says, “square peg, round hole”. The poster catches the human eye very easily because when u first glance at it, one becomes curious as to what the man is doing to the student and after further inspection, one can easily decipher the intended message from the composer. Posters are an easy way to portray knowledge and get the public aware of your statement on a situation. This piece of artwork by Zyol portrays that standardized testing doesn’t accurately portray a student’s true academic knowledge but it backs up one of my main points in how teachers are forced to make students learn and test one specific way that doesn’t benefit the student.

In addition, standardized testing can impose a hefty amount of stress on students and even their teachers. The amount of stress that is generated from students studying night in and night out, is simply unbearable. This is because nowadays when it comes to succeeding, there is no such thing as failure. The fact that students nowadays know that the only way to get into a prestigious collegiate university is to get good grades, which will then filter into a good job, and the fact that the students recognize this, puts a huge amount of unneeded stress on them because it forces one to think that one tiny slip up will cause their whole life to head in a downward spiral. When in fact, stress will only cause the student to perform worse, which is why teachers are preaching in health classes today, teachers are preaching about healthy ways to reduce stress and anxiety such as, exercising, breathing practices, and simply just taking a break and walking away from whatever is causing stress. In addition, teachers and the school board are graded on how well their students perform on standardized tests, so they make sure that the students understand how important the tests are, when in reality, the teachers are only making the tests out to be this big monster because they are concerned about their own job security, and not the development of students. When teachers exaggerate the importance of the tests, it causes students to stress because they will automatically get the mentality that if they don’t perform well then, their life is over. Students think this way because adults, including their own parents are constantly harping on them to do well and how hard it is to get a good job after college. Furthermore, according to Bright Hub Education, “Standardized tests can have negative impacts on a child’s social, emotional, and academic well-being.” It also commonly known that stress correlates to a bad mind set on the task at hand, so if stress is caused by school, then the students will naturally build up negative emotions or feelings about school. Stress and confidence are also linked together; if a teenager has a negative thought on school, it will cause their confidence and motivation to decrease which could in turn, lead to them not receiving the grade that they wanted, and could then cause more stress and so on and so forth.

Moreover, standardized tests do not test how creative a student truly is. Standardized testing encourages a narrow curriculum, outdated methods, of instruction, and harmful practices such as grade retention and tracking (National Center for Fair and Open Testing). Standardized testing’s narrow curriculum is caused by the fact that the test makers believe that every student thinks the same way, and has had access to all the same learning resources. Continuing with the fact that standardized testing uses outdates methods, reading passages and picking out the best answer in relation to the passage, fails to allow the student to open their mind, think outside the box, and show who they really are. In addition, adults and role models are always talking about how important it is the be creative, but if it’s so important, then why are we not being graded on that instead of being graded on whether we bubbled in the right answer or not, on the scantron sheet? 

In another light, standardized testing does show promise. According to Aaron Churchill from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Standardized testing has been around for years now and is commonly used to compare students and to see what a student truly knows about a subject that he or she are enrolled in. According to Aaron Churchill from the Thomas B Fordham Institute when referring to standardized tests, “They assess students based on a similar set of questions, are given under nearly identical testing conditions, and are graded by a machine or blind reviewer. They are intended to provide an accurate, unfiltered measure of what a student knows.” Churchill throughout his article lists the positives of standardized testing such as: objectivity, comparability, and accountability. Although Churchill doesn’t reference the cons of standardized testing, his pros for the testing and support behind each reason assure the reader of the article that standardized testing is a good choice to be able to find a credible method to compare students across the country in one uniform way. In addition to this, Steven J. Howard provides, author of, “What Are Standardized Literacy and Numeracy Tests Testing?”, provides information throughout his scholarly journal that proposes the argument that standardized testing not only fails to show the truth academic worth of a student but also that there is, “reliable discrimination between students who differ in the degree to which they possess the knowledge, skills and abilities assessed. (Standardized literacy and numeracy tests.) In Howard’s experiment, he aimed to determine if the educational standards are being met and wants to provide his findings back to the school districts and each individual school to help aid teachers and administrators better meet these standards.

It is true that standardized tests allow a parent to track how well or how poorly their child is testing, and if their child is improving, losing ground, or staying the same, however, all the pros listed here can also be conducted through testing alternatives. Alternatives to standardized testing include an exemplary idea such as a portfolio. What this means is that, during the student’s first year at a new school, for each course that he or she decides to take, the teacher will provide a folder for each child, and in this folder, the student will put all his graded work. The teacher will hold onto these folders in a closed off environment so that other students can’t meddle with the folders, and at the end of each class year, the teacher will meet with the student and his or her parent if requested, and then go over his or her work that has been added to the folder throughout the year. The teacher and student will then discuss the student’s growth or lack of growth throughout the course. The meeting will allow the student and or parent(s) to see their child’s growth and see how their child is learning and doing when compared to the other students. This meeting will also be an ideal time for the teacher to take note of what he or she needs to focus more on or less on for the following year

Furthermore, the tests do not help teachers understand what to work on or teach more heavily the following year because the tests do not indicate how the students learns or thinks, nor do they measure much of what the students should learn. “Classroom surveys have been conducted and results have shown that most teachers do not find scores received from standardized tests very useful” (The National Center for Fair & Open Testing). When teachers go too in-depth on a topic and tell the students that they’ll need to know certain information to pass the class, when in reality they don’t, can cause the student to focus more on the unneeded information. In return, this will lead to less time focusing on the actual information needed, and imposing stress among students. The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, voices in on the topic in that, “The tests do not help a teacher understand what to do next year while working with students because standardized tests do not indicate how the student learns or thinks, nor do they measure much of what students should learn.” Teaching comes with a very thin line to walk on because teaching too much could result in stress and anxiety, and teaching too little can lead to failure on the test itself.

In closure, standardized testing puts stress on students because students have been told their whole lives that these tests can make or break the college that one will attend, the quality of job that can be received, and the standard of living at which one can live.  Also, standardized testing doesn’t take into effect how creative the students are, and how well their minds work, because of how narrow and close minded the test makers generate the tests. In addition, standardized tests aren’t the most useful way to help teachers understand what they need to improve on for the following year. If we address this situation sooner rather than later, we can prevent future high school students from developing high levels of stress or anxiety, and deplete the need to waste time on standardized testing while instead, implement a more beneficial way to track a student’s academic growth in ways such as the portfolio.
