Argument Essay: Standardized Testing

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Standardized Testing: Good or Bad?

If someone was to ask you “how do you define student achievement?” what would your answer be? Would you say student achievement is measured by state achievement tests? Or would you say that student achievement is too complex a subject to be objectively measured? There are many important skills students must be taught, and we need a way to effectively measure if they are in fact learning those skills. However, standardized tests cannot effectively show the learning of all students, especially those that are not good test takers. And of those skills that are tested, there are an endless number of arguably more important skills that aren’t being valued because they cannot be calculated. Furthermore, …show more content…
They say this encourages the meeting of standards and also time-management skills which are skills that will lead to success later in life. “Studies of students of different ages have found a statistical association between students with high scores on standardized tests and relatively shallow thinking. One of these studies classified elementary school students as "actively engaged if they went back over things they didn't understand, asked questions of themselves as they read, and tried to connect what they were doing to what they had already learned; and as 'superficially' engaged if they just copied down answers, guessed a lot, and skipped the hard parts. It turned out that the superficial style was positively correlated with high scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) and Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT).” This proves that by avoiding attributes that are too hard to assess it gives students incentive to be superficial thinkers, which is hardly an achievement.
Ultimately it is apparent that standardized testing is an ineffective and ridiculous way to expect to get insight into what students are learning. They are not equitable, they do not measure many important life skills and they do not encourage critical thinking. To assume that test scores can replace important knowledge we need in order to understand a student's development is naive and quite frankly silly. Our educational system is stuck in the industrial age and desperately needs to join
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