Standardized Test Argumentative Essay

Improved Essays
To this day students are being taught to be test takers. Do students really learn anymore? Teachers expect students to sit and learn from a boring lesson and then take a test over the material. If teachers created or adjusted lessons to be fun, students would more likely benefit from it when taking a test. Yet, standardized test are not a good indicator of a student’s competency. Standardized test are not a helpful evaluation tool, students learn different ways, and there is too much worrying involved. Standardized test are not a helpful evaluation tool. Students are not able to think creatively in their own way. They must find the answers using the exact way they were taught to do so. Instead of finding the answers on their own, students are given answer choices. It throws the student off and confuses them to choose the wrong answer, not knowing which one to select. In …show more content…
Students most often go into a test with a positive attitude. Until they realize they are given a certain amount of time. Soon they start to worry about the time and don’t fully engage their mind and thoughts into the questions being asked. For example, if a student is given fifty-eight questions to complete in forty minutes, the student will start to worry about having enough time to finish. Their eeriness is a distraction to the point where they are trying to finish on time, rather than answering the question with the correct answer choice. Overall, standardized test are not a good indicator of a student’s competency. Tests are not a helpful evaluation tool, students learn differently, and eeriness towards a test reflects negatively on the test taker. Federal laws should be changed and students should not be judged off of a standardized test. Standardized test do not fully represent a student’s

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Jay Mctighe Critique

    • 885 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Often in today’s schools, students will ask, “Will this be on the test?” if the answer is no, most students stop paying attention. This culture of teaching to the test can even…

    • 885 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Standardized tests are only able to measure a few of the many important aspects of what is a meaningful and worthwhile education. In the article "The Myths of Standardized Testing,”by Valerie Strauss,the book The Myths of Standardized Tests: Why They Don’t Tell You What You Think They Do is summerized into a short consensus that standerized testing is not good enough to meat the stander set by the no child left behind laws. "Creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity,"(Strauss) are only some of the things that a standardized test fail to examine. If these tests are only testing one part of the education system then why are they being used to see the progress of a student? Maybe instead of coming up with more and more tests that all measure the same thing, maybe test makers should find a different way to measure other parts that are important to…

    • 844 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Beads of sweat gather on nervous foreheads of young students. Their hands shake, lips tremble. Able to burst into tears in a matter of seconds. All over the world children of all ages are being forced to take complicated standardized tests. These tests cause extremely high levels of stress, they are unfair, and they waste large amounts of valuable class time Children who should be running outside in the sun, feeling the sun or cool rain on their face, are inside worrying about the test tomorrow.…

    • 735 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Not-Open-Ended Solution to Testing Bob takes a standardized test in a room with 30 other students. Everyone is silent, bubbling in answers for 3 hours straight. Bob is sitting at his own desk with a Scantron answer sheet and test booklet. He has prepared for this test an hour a day for the last few months. A month later, results come back and Bob finds out he failed.…

    • 661 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    My heart pounded. My knees shook. I feared the other twenty students sitting around me could hear my heart leaping out of my chest as I read each question on the SAT. When I looked around the room, I realized they all had the same look of terror on their faces as I did. This test determined the rest of our futures; whether we’d get into the college of our dreams or not.…

    • 803 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Testing students in subjects such as science and social studies is not fair to all students. Since 25%-40% of students get test anxiety, even if they study and know their stuff, they still blank out, freeze up, zone out, or feel so nervous that they cannot write the test. Students who are highly test-anxious score about 12% less than other students who don’t get test anxiety. Equally students don’t always have time to study and memorize everything before a test. Not only…

    • 925 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Standardized Testing Flaws

    • 1075 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Could you imagine cramming for a huge test but not being able to use what you learned in your daily routine or sometime in life? Standardized tests are not furthering students education. A test is based on showing what you know. Schools blow so much money on these tests. Tests increase the discrimination in schools.…

    • 1075 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Imagine being stuck in a bare, silent and chilly room for several hours, nothing but a #2 pencil and a testing booklet to keep you company. This was the reality for many children as, a few days ago, high school students in America sat down to take the PSAT, just one of the many standardized test they will take and have taken throughout their academic careers. A standardized test is a type of test where students are given the same range of questions in similar testing environments in order to judge and compare their scores. Standardized tests are being administered more and more as of late, due to increased funding and acts such as the 2001 No Child Left Behind act which encouraged the use of standardized tests in school. However, there has been much controversy around whether forcing students to take more standardized tests is a good thing, as there is evidence that they are biased, inaccurate, and do the education system more harm than good.…

    • 1081 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    These standardized tests are don't measure the whole person's ability, only math and reading. Since standardized tests only test you in math and reading some students will score low. They will score low because if they are getting tested over something they aren't good at or can't show their creativity they struggle for not being tested over something other than math and reading. I believe that standardized tests don't know your abilities they only focus on what you know in math and reading, but some students may be better in science or social studies. Standardized tests don't test our abilities and they don't show a student's true knowledge.…

    • 531 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Older students do not take standardized tests seriously because the tests do not affect their grades in most cases. Instead, they are more concerned with their overall work in the class throughout the semester as it actually affects their educational status--and furthermore their acceptance at the university level upon exiting high school. In recent years, a “teaching to the test” mentality has been making its way into schools across the country, replacing good teaching practices with “drill n’ kill” type learning. A study conducted in 2007 from the University of Maryland found that the pressures teachers were feeling to ‘teach to the test’ for standardized testing were leading to “declines in teaching higher-order thinking, in the amount of time spent on complex assignments, and in the actual amount of high cognitive content in the curriculum” (Jacobs).…

    • 813 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    These tests can make or break a student 's grade or chance to getting into the college of their dreams. Standardized tests are important and should not be taken lightly. While some people find these tests to be unfair and have no use, there are many valuable reasons that all students must complete these…

    • 1429 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Standardized testing has many problems that are not addressed. Testing isn’t doing what it is supposed to do. Standardized testing doesn’t reach a student's full potential. Schools need to be about learning rather than preparing for high-stake testing. No one is fixing the problems of standardized test in schools.…

    • 1278 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Most students, if not all, notably dislike the need for standardized testing in school, and it's a perfectly reasonable opinion. Many researchers and experts say that standardized tests are a massive waste of time and effort, and they do not help students’ education at all. Both teachers and students agree that it is stressful and unnecessary. Some schools spend days, if not weeks, to test when they could be using the time to teach. Standardized tests also create unfair judgments to students and have their future based on a number.…

    • 813 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Some people say that tests like the ACT and the SAT provide an objective, “summative” assessment of student achievement. But no two students are the same, you can’t summarize the knowledge of a mass amount of students. No two students know exactly the same thing. Another reason why some people want to keep standardized testing is because they show comparability. They say that these tests can show how different schools compare to each other, but each school won’t follow the exact same curriculum and they each have different students.…

    • 1625 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Standardized tests are not an accurate measure of a student’s academic abilities. Testing can have many different factors that occur, making it quite inaccurate. Education is a fragile matter that must not be taken lightly. Extensive thought should go into making a child’s education as stress free and effective as possible. High-stake and standardized test need to be used with caution and care in the school system because of the many things they do that eventually lead to the harm of student learning.…

    • 1336 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays