The Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing

Standardized tests were invented in China in the seventh century and later used for more than a thousand years as a means of selecting that nation’s civil servants, judges and military officers. During the Cultural Revolution the standardized tests were all but abandoned and the basis for those positions was merely what political party you supported or what you had accomplished in your military life. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that standardized tests and academic achievement became the determinant of university selection. (Popham, 1999) However, just because standardized tests were being used to determine how prepared students were to enter a college or university does not mean that standardized tests truly measure educational quality. …show more content…
In order for this to be true, and the results to accurately access each student, the following must be true of the exam: The test must encompass a high population of students, these students must be geographically diverse, heterogeneous and all having the same native language. (Heyneman & Fagerlind, 2014) This is not however an accurate depiction of the standardized tests being used in our schools today. Standardized tests do not cover the total realm of what is being taught in school because the length of the exam would not be something that would lend itself to a realistic amount of testing time. Most people feel that students already spend too much time taking the tests that do exist. Standardized tests only cover about forty to fifty items in each subject field. (Popham, 1999) These few questions cannot effectively determine what a student’s true strength or weaknesses in that subject area is. There are also other aspects of the test that make it a failed procedure for determining the quality of education being provided by the schools the test is designed to evaluate. Keep in mind that the standardized tests are the same no matter what state, region or school you take it in. The test is exactly the same. Now we all know that the students in each state, region and school are not all the same. What a student inherently knows or learns outside of school is something that the test cannot control for. Standardized tests used to determine if your school and teachers are providing a good education are from the start assuming that all children are equally capable of learning the same things. I know that no one believes this is true, students are not all born with identical abilities to learn. Even if that were true, what a student would inevitably learn at home and take to school are things like vocabulary used at home. In a wealthy family the children have