College Readiness Assessment In Higher Education

Although there is evidence both in support and opposition of the idea that college readiness assessments do accurately measure a student’s ability to succeed in higher education; testing should not be the only deciding factor in any student’s acceptance into college and society there after. With american culture and education becoming more obsessed with test scores and less concerned with the academic ability of the student and potential to learn, the country could soon be facing many problems as this generation of the test based learning is pushed out into the real world without the proper knowledge needed to be prepared. College readiness assessments have been the center of an ongoing debate on how to better prepare young adults for higher …show more content…
Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act has been putting pressure on educators and schools to produce high test scores, and due to that pressure to succeed — the bar is being lowered and students are getting cheated out of an adequate education. One of the contributing causes of poor college readiness over the past few years are the lowering state learning standards in response to the incentives and punishments given under the statues of NCLB for reaching, or failing to reach, those standards. Students are not learning the amount they are capable of because schools fear state defined failure(state defined). Greed and competition play a big role in the lack of what is being taught. If students were to be pushed to their potential imagine the expansion in limits they would be capable of reaching post secondary education. Teaching to the test has become an important problem to take note of. With schools under pressure to meet standards, educators have begun focusing on what is being tested, thus narrowing what is being taught, down to the questions that will be asked. This discourages creativity, diversity, innovation, and critical thinking.“Standardized tests measure only a small portion of what makes education meaningful. According to late education researcher Gerald W. Bracey, PhD, qualities that standardized tests cannot measure include,"Creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, …show more content…
State testing has been a useful method in comparing states and school districts as well as setting common goals universal to the country as a whole. In College and Career Ready Standards and Assessments the uses of tests are clearly described, “Improved assessments can be used to accurately measure student growth; to better measure how states, districts, schools, principals, and teachers are educating students; to help teachers adjust and focus on their teaching; and to provide better information to students and their families.”(Pollard and Cozens). Supporters of standardized testing often counter argue that the tests are not narrowing down learning, they are simply creating a focused environment on key basic subjects such as English, Math, Reading, and Science. They do not ignore subjects such as art and music, they just shift more of the focus on the key subjects that are believed to be more beneficial to the student. Testing may be beneficial, but it cannot be accountable for covering all of what a student should know to be accepted into a college of their choice. In Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What we can do to Change it Peter Sacks explains evidence in opposition of SAT