Argumentative Essay On Standardized Testing

As a current student in high school, I am very aware of the controversy towards standardized testing being required for measuring student comprehension. There are those that are completely for it and there are those that are completely against it, there is not an in-between. At the high school that I attend, this is not a constantly discussed and debated issue. The only time that I even hear people discussing this issue is when it is time for our school to take these tests. However, there are some high schools that are totally polar opposite and are persistently conversing over this issue. While taking this into consideration, I began asking myself if this was really an issue that was worth discussing. In order to make this decision, I needed …show more content…
This is invalid for one simple reason, there have not been any studies conducted that prove this. Also, they say that taking standardized tests assists students in developing habits that will help them throughout life. This might seem to be a true statement, but this too has not been proven. They even try to say that these tests are inexpensive and require very little class time. This statement is entirely false; I say this because of the fact that the U.S. actually spends billions of dollars every year on standardized testing. Due to the U.S. spending such enormous amounts of money on these tests each year, the companies that create and then grade standardized tests make considerably large profits that appear to be increasing rapidly year after year. After that is all said and done, the same companies then turn around and gain even more profits by selling materials that are supposedly meant to help improve scores. Standardized tests are essentially just one of the many strategies that these kinds of companies use in order to offer a fast and simple, but in no way accurate system for measuring “progress”. In general this just goes to show that schools would pretty much prefer to take the easy route and measure efficiency instead of effectiveness. It also shows that they would rather measure how well they are doing something rather than asking if what they are doing makes