Standardized Testing

Should Standardized Testing be used in Education?

I believe that the education system should continue to use standardized testing as a means to test students. I think standardized tests are very important because these tests can be used as a concrete way to see what students know regarding subjects, and to see how their knowledge has developmentally progressed throughout their years as a student. Schools can use this information in a very general sense as well as a individual sense for their students. For example in general if a school has had consistently low reading scores, perhaps the teaching approach towards reading needs to be changed. Also standardized tests can show where students are in relation to other students (comparisons can be made within the school, or across any school). Being compared to others is a fact of life, everybody will have to face this harsh reality when they enter the job field.

A potential downside to standardized test is that it’s impossible for any these of tests to be completely rid of all bias. Test questions always have bias behind them (whether is cultural or personal, or geographical). There are many ways to diminish this bias, but it can never be entirely taken away. Some subjects, like math and reading, are easier to create more accurate test questions. However, for areas like science and history, its very hard be get rid of the bias. Often times teachers decide what is most important for their students to learn in these less straight forward topics; therefore a students comes into a standardized test with their own teacher’s assumptions. For an area like science, a test question probably reflects a students knowledge on reading or interpreting graphs rather than their actual scientific knowledge. This being said, I don’t really know if standardized testing should be used for subjects like science and history because they are not really strictly assessing what the students know about the topic. Essay questions are better for these types of subjects, but it isn’t conceivably possible to mass produce these questions for a standardized test.

I believe standardized tests are here to stay. There are definitely some obvious problems with them, but I don’t think these negatives should let us totally throw out this method of testing which has obviously had many positive effects on the educational system.