It’s that time of the school year again that all students loathe. Come every spring, every student across America is forced to sit down for hours at a time to determine how smart they are in relativity to the country. What is it, you may ask? Standardized testing. This topic is highly debated around the world of whether or not schools should require students to take them. From thoroughly researching this topic, I firmly believe that students shouldn’t be forced to take standardized tests. It causes so much anxiety and stress that it doesn’t show what students truly know. Secondly, these tests don’t measure things that are important for us to know. Lastly, the tests aren’t reliable.
To begin, standardized tests causes a lot of stress and anxiety …show more content…
Primarily, it’s only one day where they sit in a classroom for hours on end and stare at a screen. This doesn’t measure their knowledge to the full extent. Some of the most intelligent kids could have had a fight with their parents before they went to school which might have dropped their score and made them less focused. Secondly, you don’t actually get any information about what to work on, only how smart you are. Everyone guesses on at least a few questions, and if they guess correctly, they get a higher score than if someone guessed incorrectly. Consequently, the person who guessed more right but still knew as much as the person who guessed more wrong would get a higher score on the test even though both people knew just as much as the other. A study published by the Brookings Institution found that 50-80% of year-over-year test score improvements were temporary and "caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning..." This reveals that these tests don’t show their true knowledge and that a vast majority of them crammed in everything they needed to know shortly before the test, which doesn’t help them in any way.
Overall, standardized testing shouldn’t be required for students to take. Tests like these add unwanted stress to teens lives who already have enough or that as it is. Standardized test also don’t measure the important skills you actually need in the “real world”. They also aren’t reliable in terms of measuring how smart a student is. While some might say that these tests give a good look of where the school is at in relativity to the country, the score of the tests are most of the time not truly saying what the student
To begin, standardized tests causes a lot of stress and anxiety …show more content…
Primarily, it’s only one day where they sit in a classroom for hours on end and stare at a screen. This doesn’t measure their knowledge to the full extent. Some of the most intelligent kids could have had a fight with their parents before they went to school which might have dropped their score and made them less focused. Secondly, you don’t actually get any information about what to work on, only how smart you are. Everyone guesses on at least a few questions, and if they guess correctly, they get a higher score than if someone guessed incorrectly. Consequently, the person who guessed more right but still knew as much as the person who guessed more wrong would get a higher score on the test even though both people knew just as much as the other. A study published by the Brookings Institution found that 50-80% of year-over-year test score improvements were temporary and "caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning..." This reveals that these tests don’t show their true knowledge and that a vast majority of them crammed in everything they needed to know shortly before the test, which doesn’t help them in any way.
Overall, standardized testing shouldn’t be required for students to take. Tests like these add unwanted stress to teens lives who already have enough or that as it is. Standardized test also don’t measure the important skills you actually need in the “real world”. They also aren’t reliable in terms of measuring how smart a student is. While some might say that these tests give a good look of where the school is at in relativity to the country, the score of the tests are most of the time not truly saying what the student