Standardized Testing Argumentative Essay

510 Words2 Pages

Standardized tests are continually wasting large amounts of students’ time by requiring them to study and take many tests over the course of about a week or so. This waste of time does not positively effect students’ performances at all. According to The Washington Post, the amount of time used by standardized testing in the 8th grade is 25.3 HOURS! That is more than one whole day! However, there are people who say that standardized tests do positively effect students’ performances just because the students do not want to get bad grades on their tests, therefore, they work hard in school.

The score of a student taking a standardized test is not reliable and there are many factors that can affect that student’s score. One factor is cheating, a lot of kids in schools cheat off of other kids. Also, many TEACHERS help students cheat by giving them answers to the test. Quote from Procon.org: “178 Atlanta public school teachers and administrators from 44 schools were found to be cheating on standardized tests according to a July 2011 state report.” Because of this, some students might get a higher score than they normally would have on the test. Another factor …show more content…

Procon.org writes: “A five-year University of Maryland study completed in 2007 found “the pressure teachers were feeling to ‘teach to the test”’ since NCLB was leading to “declines in teaching higher-order thinking, in the amount of time spent on complex assignments, and in the actual amount of high cognitive content in the curriculum.” This quote shows that the knowledge taught to students is very narrowed down. Also, students may not find subjects interesting because they do not learn the skills to study a subject in-depth. This can lead to college being very hard for students because they lack the ability to research and have an actual interest in the subject that they are

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