<p>For as long as I have been a teacher, I have heard gripes from many a teacher against standardized testing. The objections usually are one or more of the following:
<strong>Standardized tests do not test what students really need to learn … such as critical thinking skills.</strong>Standardized tests are biased against certain socio-ethnic groups.**The pressure these tests put on students is unfair.
To a large extent, I do agree with many of these complaints, but are these really valid arguments against standardized testing? Lets take them in order</p>
<p>1) Standardized tests do not test subjective skills well because they must conform to a multiple choice format so that a computer can grade them. Computers must grade them due to time, money and the need to keep out any monkeying of the results. However, a question we should ask is… in areas that are not covered by standardized testing, like composition, are the requisite skills being taught? Having taught composition at community college and university for 10 years I have to give the resounding answer of NO. When I went to college for the first time in 1982, English 101 (composition) was a remedial course. The assumption was that incoming freshmen already knew how to write essays and research papers. As a mother of a child that went through public school recently, I can assure you that writing is hardly ever touched upon anymore. Gone are the “what I did on my summer vacation” and book reports which were a staple of my primary school experience … forget about writing 5-paragraph essays in secondary. Why is this? This is one area where there is no outside way of keeping schools from neglecting.
2) Standardized tests may be biased against certain socio-ethnic groups but that may be more because these groups’ lack of exposure to the needed information. That means that they are being ill-served by their schools, not by the test itself. After all, biology is the same no matter the color of the person studying it. Sub-cultures may exists and alter one’s view of the world, but the main culture of the country is something that can be taught fairly uniformly. Leave the arguments over what the culture should be to the university level. There is a reason why colleges put such great emphasis on SAT scores and why graduating college with a 4.0 means almost nothing (esp. in the humanities) once out in the working world.
3) As for the pressure argument,…how is a doctor supposed to work under the pressure of brain surgery, with life and death hanging in the balance, if he cannot work under the pressure of a multiple-choice test?" Sorry guys… working under pressure is a fact of life. Besides, if one really blew the test because of unforeseen circumstances such as illness, the test can be retaken. These tests are, of course, such an invaluable tool for college admission officers because they are a consistent factor for every student in the country. Certain high schools artificially inflate their students GPAs, some high schools courses are easier at one school than at another, and it is impossible to compare a report card from a successful private school with a report card from a struggling inner-city school. In addition, availability or access to certain classes, strength of teachers, and class sizes are other high-school specific factors that could favor one student over another, less fortunate student.
Until or unless the teaching profession sets real standards for itself… it will continue to have standards imposed upon it from the outside. It is better for students to have some standards to meet up to than none at all. Hence, standardized testing is a necessary evil.</p>