Problems With Standardized Testing

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Standardized testing has been a large part of every student’s life for years. However, what most people do not realize are all the problems with the standardized testing system. Students are stressed, teachers are worried, and schools are pressured to do better. While standardized tests are not used accurately today, people can make changes to the tests to better implement them. Standardized testing has a long history. Testing began in China in 2200 BC, where students took literary tests to determine their future (Dolezalek 24-25). Thousands of years later in America, immigrants took tests to determine where to place them in school to better integrate them (Dominique). In the 1930s, the first state assessment was formed. Dolezalek writes about …show more content…
Each state is allowed to implement its own test with different standards (No Child Left Behind (2002) versus Every Student Succeeds). This means some states have higher or lower standards with harder or easier tests. How a student does on these tests largely depends on where he or she takes it. In lower performing schools where test scores need to rise, a student who is on the lower end of the performance spectrum may be encouraged by the school and teachers to drop out or to go into a special education program (Mulholland). If a student receives a lower score than he or she expected, it can lower that student’s self-esteem, causing them to feel inferior and making them feel destined to fail (Taylor). These tests may also teach students to follow directions, but not to innovate. Fixing the tests is a …show more content…
The tests should have a wider range of subjects, such as health and science, to include students who are more accomplished in areas other than reading and math. Rating teachers and schools should not be the priority of the tests, but rather their primary purpose should be to show students how they are doing in certain subject areas compared to others. Another problem is the difference of tests in the US. At the moment, standardized tests are only standard to each state, not the whole nation. If a law was passed requiring certain nationwide standards be put into effect, the tests could more accurately show how students are doing compared to others. The government would have to work together with the test and textbook writers to make sure standards are followed and to make sure the content in textbooks matches that of the tests. Reformation of the tests may be expensive, so to pay for the new tests, the money currently being used to write tests will be used to develop new ones. Current tests are payed for from taxes, and can be quite expensive. In Texas alone, it cost about 88 million dollars per year from 2009 to 20012 (“Standardized Tests - ProCon.org”). In addition to this solution, there are others that could be