Standardized Testing: A Necessary Evil
It’s standardized testing day at school and tensions are running high as you strive to get the best possible scores. Then you ask yourself, what is the purpose of standardized tests? Standardized tests come in many forms and are used by most developed nations’ educational systems. In the U.S., examples of standardized tests include the SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, GMAT, ACTFL, and PARCC, but the list includes many others. A U.S. high school freshman might take twenty standardized tests in a single year! Standardized testing costs schools an enormous amount of money to administer but the tests must be supported because they provide important benefits to individual students, school systems, institutions of …show more content…
There are currently thirty nine states plus the District of Columbia working on creating a whole new kind of standardized test. Rather than trying to create a new curriculum entirely, these tests are focusing on identifying the most important skills used today, and in the work place (Doorey 2). Most standardized tests are taken on paper, and must be mailed or shipped to be graded, which takes a long time and makes it hard to get information back to students that need it. New tests are supposed to be taken on computers and submitted to online databases, getting information back almost instantly, making it much easier to gather data and give information back to students (Doorey 3).
Although standardized testing has many pros to offer, two large cons can be the cost and the narrowing curriculum. Standardized tests can cost both monetarily and socially, which creates great controversy among students. Testing costs an immense amount of time and effort, which can put a large amount of strain on teachers and students alike. In some schools, test preparation may take up to one fourth of the school year (Kozol 19). With all the effort dished out by under privileged schools, it seems the government is trying to “testing students out of poverty” (Dianis …show more content…
All these factors come together to form a large point; that standardized testing must be followed to increase the effectiveness of today’s education system and to further help the economy. Today’s education system will dictate what advances are made in the future, so it is important to make our education as efficient and useful as possible. A simple text book today, or a unit of a subject could influence one of the biggest advances in history, creating a whole new look at the
It’s standardized testing day at school and tensions are running high as you strive to get the best possible scores. Then you ask yourself, what is the purpose of standardized tests? Standardized tests come in many forms and are used by most developed nations’ educational systems. In the U.S., examples of standardized tests include the SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, GMAT, ACTFL, and PARCC, but the list includes many others. A U.S. high school freshman might take twenty standardized tests in a single year! Standardized testing costs schools an enormous amount of money to administer but the tests must be supported because they provide important benefits to individual students, school systems, institutions of …show more content…
There are currently thirty nine states plus the District of Columbia working on creating a whole new kind of standardized test. Rather than trying to create a new curriculum entirely, these tests are focusing on identifying the most important skills used today, and in the work place (Doorey 2). Most standardized tests are taken on paper, and must be mailed or shipped to be graded, which takes a long time and makes it hard to get information back to students that need it. New tests are supposed to be taken on computers and submitted to online databases, getting information back almost instantly, making it much easier to gather data and give information back to students (Doorey 3).
Although standardized testing has many pros to offer, two large cons can be the cost and the narrowing curriculum. Standardized tests can cost both monetarily and socially, which creates great controversy among students. Testing costs an immense amount of time and effort, which can put a large amount of strain on teachers and students alike. In some schools, test preparation may take up to one fourth of the school year (Kozol 19). With all the effort dished out by under privileged schools, it seems the government is trying to “testing students out of poverty” (Dianis …show more content…
All these factors come together to form a large point; that standardized testing must be followed to increase the effectiveness of today’s education system and to further help the economy. Today’s education system will dictate what advances are made in the future, so it is important to make our education as efficient and useful as possible. A simple text book today, or a unit of a subject could influence one of the biggest advances in history, creating a whole new look at the