Argument On Standardized Testing

Education is one of the most important if not the most important aspect of a child’s life. Therefore lawmakers, parents, and teachers try their best in order to provide the best education for children so that they are effective for their generation. With that being said lately the quality of education in the United States of America has been falling. Many laws have been put into place in order to better facilitate the curriculum being taught to the students. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT) are a few to name. Due to the passage of these laws the nation has become increasingly dependent upon standardized testing in order to evaluate students progress. Although lawmakers are trying their best to educate the students and measure their progress, standardized testing is not an accurate way to measure a child’s progress.

Our current standardized testing system is not displaying the true intelligence of test takers. This is due to a variety of factors such as examiners' errors, over interpretation of the tests' data, failure to include certain age groups of students, and marketability (Czubaj 1). There are obvious errors in the standardized testing of our students, yet these tests are still used to determine things that are crucial to a student future. These tests can place a student in an advanced class or put them in a class for challenged students. Using these evaluative standards that are inaccurate isn’t fair to our students. A bad test result can ruin a students motive for education, and if this is done unnecessarily, this is a terrible thing. An unearned good result can leave a child who needs help to move on without understanding what they need to know. A common argument that advocators of standardized tes...

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...cceed. This can only be done when the right students are in the right classes. When you give the same standardized testing to kids that are on much different levels and are from many backgrounds, you get inaccurate information on the intelligence of the child and what they need to learn.

Standardized testing is the easiest way to evaluate a child. But with all the errors in it, it is not the best way. Errors in the test lead to misplacement and misguidance of children. Cheating and teaching to the test do not allow for all around learning. Also students that are not ready to take the same tests as others provide inaccurate results about the students. When the United States switches to and evaluative standard that is based on conceptual learning, problem solving, and real life application skills, this will be an accurate way of measuring a student’s intelligence.