The Pros And Cons Of Standardized Testing

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Is Intelligence A Requirement For Success? People tend to compare themselves to others. One of the most common ways is using intelligence testing. These standardized tests are thought to evaluate and predict an individual’s intelligence compared to their peers. Sometimes individuals confuse these results with an individual’s ability to be successful. However, intelligence testing are not able to fully evaluate an individual’s overall intelligence, so they absolutely cannot predict an individual’s capacity to succeed. Understanding that society’s view of intelligence is not reliable, and has no bearing on an individual’s capacity to be successful is a necessary concept students need to be aware of in order to be successful in their chosen career …show more content…
Standardized testing is meant to assess an individual’s mental abilities and compares them with others (DeWall and Myers392). Standardize tests can be one of two forms: an achievement or aptitude test. Achievement tests reflect your ability to regurgitate learned material while aptitude tests reflect the ability to learn new material (DeWall and Myers 392). Although standardize tests where not created to reflect a person’s intellect, they have become just that. An individual that scores a certain result on a standardized test is labeled intelligent by society, but is that an accurate assumption? Standardized tests are targeted to test specific skills therefore they cannot possibly represent a person’s overall intelligence which includes multiple skills. Standardized tests also only promotes convergent thinking, coming up with a single correct answer, instead of encouraging divergent, coming up with multiple solutions, or creative thinking (DeWall and Myers 366). Another drawback to standardized tests are that an individual’s score is influence by outside factors. Success on these tests can be prevented by self-doubt which may impair attention, memory, performance (DeWall and Myers 414). All of these factors prove that standardized tests are being misused as a gauge of intelligence. In order to be successful an individual must possess multiple skills and the ability to thinking differently depending on the situation. If standardized tests only measure one skill or thought process, then they are obviously not a good judge of an individual’s overall