Testing Is A Good Indication Of A Student 's Competency

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Throughout our education, students like myself, are constantly given tests to assess our knowledge on the material that we have learned. However, do we really know what our test scores indicate? Lately, it has been a constant public debate as to whether or not test scores are a good indication of a student’s competency. Test scores do not accurately depict a student’s knowledge for several reasons. To fully understand the concept, we should first define what a test is. According to the article “Important of Testing is Psychology and Education,” published by a2zPsychology in 2002, “A test is defined as a measure of a person’s knowledge, intelligence, or other characteristics in a systematic way.” Teachers are required to give their students exams for many reasons that includes: identifying what students have learned, discovering their learning abilities, determining their strengths and weaknesses and deciding where to place a student. As stated in Charles Daves’s article “Value of Standardized Tests in Indicating How Well Students are Learning” published by Jossey-Bass in 1984, “Critics have charged that such tests measure only a narrow spectrum of abilities, that the tests by their very nature discourage creative and imaginative thinking, that the results of the tests have far too significant an effect on the life chances of young people, that the emphasis in a multiple-choice test is wrongly on ‘the right answer’ and on simplicity instead of thoughtful judgments, that the tests favor the advantaged over the disadvantaged while claiming to be neutral, and that the tests are inherently biased against those who are unfamiliar with language and concepts of the majority culture.” Any test scores cannot accurately determine a future ... ... middle of paper ... ... In order for norms to work effectively, it is established that students must take the same test under standardized circumstances. Standardization is a set of uniform procedures for treating each student in a test, making sure that everyone is testing in the same conditions. There are several cases where a student may not be tested under the same conditions as their peers. For instance, a student may get more time than others. For this reason, it is not fair. Other issues include: being given clearer or more detailed instructions, allowing to ask questions, and getting motivated by a tester to perform better. Due to these conditions, it is difficult to analyze what a given test score indicates or how it is related to a comparison group. To fix this dilemma, explicit instructions should be included to inform the administer how to give an exam to avoid any unfairness.

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