In life, it’s always good practice to question the things that have become normalized and think to yourself, “Just because it’s normal to me, does that mean it’s the best way of doing things?” This topic frequently comes to my mind when the end of the term is near and final exams approach. School systems all over the world measure a person’s academic progress or understanding of a subject through standardized testing. However, does it actually measure a person’s knowledge of a subject, or does it simply determine which students are good at taking tests?
Every student has surely felt overwhelming anxiety before taking a test that will make or break a grade. No matter what grade a student receives on a test, it should not decide their future. In my opinion, tests should be eliminated entirely as a means to measure academic progress.
According to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, standardized tests are problematic because they don’t value creativity or diversity and create unneeded stress. The ASCD states, “Standardized tests reduce the richness of human experience and human learning to a number or set of numbers. This is dehumanizing. A student may have a deep knowledge of a particular subject but receive no acknowledgment because their test score was low.”
Instead of standardized tests being a means to someone’s understanding of a subject, educators should measure knowledge of a subject through hands-on work. For example, this includes work studies, hands-on projects, group discussions and more real-life situations that may occur outside a classroom.
The environment of a standardized test is extremely unrealistic. Outside of a test room, students can ask questions, use resources and take their time to perform well instead of being in a timed testing environment. In the real world, people can do all of this and more, so why do we not have the ability to do this in a testing environment? For example, the SAT is a four-hour long test with multiple sections in each subject, and depending on the score, it can affect the student’s future.
Maybe it’s time that society challenges the use of standardized testing. Students are being held back from their full academic potential and the use of these tests is the cause. “During the time that a child is taking a test, he/she could be doing something far more valuable: actually learning something new and interesting,” said Thomas Armstrong psychologist and educator for the ASCD.
