The Problems with Standardized Testing

Educational tools enable students to learn and allow teachers to asses these students, but how is evaluating these students in the same way and even lowering their marks and averaging them out a representation of how well that students are doing and what they are truly capable of achieving. As Albert Einstein once said “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”.

In the same sense, that if a teacher were to judge a student’s intelligence and ability based off their exam score, the teacher may not see what the student’s true potential is. Any teacher is not able to confidently judge a student’s learning experiences through the same style for all the children in their classroom. As students and teachers, they know that each person is different and has different learning styles. Yet when the teacher assess them they do not offer other types of assessments for the students. These standardized tests then give an inaccurate reflection of a student’s progress and learning abilities, in the same way the fishes’ ability is not catered for. If teachers understand that students all learn in a different way, why does the United States insist on examining them in the same way with standardized tests? Instead of having just one standardized test throughout the United States, there should be different forms of assessments that students have the option to take because not every student is the same and should not be tested the as if they are the same.

Teachers have not always been able to test students frequently on class material, unlike modern teachers. The earliest known standardized tests were administered to government job applicants in 7th Century Im...

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