Comic by Priyanka Pai
It’s a feeling many school-aged children know well: sitting down with a No. 2 pencil and a booklet of questions while your teacher reads a set of pre-written instructions from her intimidating manual that reads unlike anything you have ever heard her speak before. The standardized testing season for this spring semester has officially begun. Administered across the country, standardized tests have gone from a simple measure of knowledge to an important part of the college admissions process. Although it may play a part in the lives of schoolchildren, standardized testing is an unreliable gauge of learning at best, a discriminatory one at worst.
The standardized testing administered throughout the pre-collegiate years should be removed from both public and private schooling systems, or at the very least, serve as an intra-institutional measure, to be shared with no one outside the individual administering school. The use of these tests’ scores within an educational institution could be beneficial as an indicator of the concepts understood by the students, and those which should be retaught before the next grade is begun. The results of the test would thereby indicate which concepts proved difficult, allowing educators to adjust their teaching to better convey the information. The scores from standardized tests shouldn’t be used to compare teachers, individual students or schools, as there are too many variables impacting the scores of the tests for these comparisons to be valid.
For many, the debate about pre-collegiate standardized testing comes not from the tests themselves, but rather from how their tests’ scores are used.
The use of standardized testing results outside of the individual educational institution would not be debated if the tests themselves were reliable and fairly written. Unfortunately, this is not the case. According to Emeritus Professor W. James Popham at the University of California, Los Angeles, standardized tests, especially those given to children below the ninth grade, test three factors: “what is taught in school, a student’s native intellectual ability and a student’s out-of-school learning.” There would not be as big a debate about standardized tests if it were only what was taught in the classroom that was tested. The subject matter of the test does not account for other variables like home environment, socioeconomic status and previous life experience. Because of this, the student’s score does not serve as a valuable tool in determining the ability of the teacher, the intelligence of the student or the curriculum presented in the classroom.
Popham gives an example of a question that says, “A plant’s fruit always contains seeds. Which of the items below is not a fruit?” The question proceeds to list: A) orange, B) pumpkin, C) apple and D) celery. On the surface it seems like an innocent question, but due to differences in socioeconomic factors, availability of foods and parental consumption choices, it is possible that the sixth grader to whom this question was directed may never have seen the inside of a pumpkin or chewed on a stalk of celery. This makes the question unfair to such students, unless of course they had been thoroughly instructed, in the classroom, on the classification of fruits.
A popular argument for standardized testing is that it’s inclusive and non-discriminatory because the content is the same for all test takers, regardless of gender, race or socioeconomic background. However, as mentioned in a TIME magazine article by Cornell University Associate Professor Noliwe M. Rooks, “black and Latino students in New York score below whites and Asians on standardized tests.” If we take this information and couple it with the argument that standardized tests are inclusive and non-discriminatory, it would lead to the conclusion that Latino and black students are on the whole less knowledgeable than their white and Asian classmates, a statement that is not only racist, but completely false. To say that standardized tests are inclusive and non-discriminatory is simply an invalid argument that can be disproven using the scores provided by the testing agencies as well as data collected about comparing socioeconomic status and performance on the test.
[quote_colored name=”” icon_quote=”no”]Standardize testing is not a valid or respectable way to assess the education a child is receiving, that child’s intelligence or the ability of the teacher to convey knowledge.[/quote_colored]
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the standardized testing industry is the method in which open-ended and essay questions are graded. As many standardized tests only occur once a year, it is not economical for testing agencies to keep the large number of people needed to grade the tests on staff year round. Instead they use temporary workers to score the free response sections of the test. As stated by Dan DiMaggio, “all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies.”
DiMaggio, a former test scorer himself, is intimately familiar with the scoring of the standardized test. He writes that when tests with such high stakes placed on the results are scored, they are not done so by an educator, but rather a worker who is paid a low wage, has no medical benefits and most likely doesn’t possess a degree in the subject he is scoring. Even worse, the new trend is to pay per paper scored, meaning that there is an incentive to score papers as quickly as possible, a method that cannot lead to the most accurate scoring possible. As if these thoughts weren’t unsettling enough, DiMaggio points out that if assigned scores are dropping too low, the scorers are encouraged to lower their standards of scoring and raise scores in an attempt to match the statistics of the scores given the previous year. This leads to a consistent statistical result from year to year thus rendering any data about score distribution useless. If nothing else, the scoring of standardized tests must be changed in order to provide a more accurate score to the student and educational institution.
The final stage in one’s standardized testing career may come in the form of an exam taken if one desires to become a doctor, lawyer or pilot. There is some thought that because standardized tests are used to assess preparedness for these specific positions, standardized testing is valid across the board. However, there is a major difference between the exams given to those wishing to enter a given professions and high-schoolers preparing for college or students who simply wish to advance to the next grade.
The difference is the impact that these people will have not only on themselves, but on those with whom they will work. The tests are meant as a safety net of protection for the community. Lawyers must know the law to help clients who are guaranteed a lawyer by the Bill of Rights. Doctors must know how to diagnose and treat illnesses in order to effectively practice and fulfill their societal role. Pilots could seriously harm those around them if they are unable to safely conduct the complex operations of a plane. The standardized tests administered to children are said to be of benefit to them and the school when, in reality, the benefit is to the test creators who make money off of the administering and scoring of the tests, a process that is just as flawed.
Standardize testing is not a valid or respectable way to assess the education a child is receiving, that child’s intelligence or the ability of the teacher to convey knowledge. Standardized tests should be abandoned and those resources allocated to helping students who are falling behind and working with students who show exceptional promise. Rather than continuing to allow standardized tests to quantify the effectiveness of education, we should create a system of effective education that requires no quantification.
Alli Buettner is a College sophomore from St. Louis, Missouri.
