It’s a Standardized World After All

It’s a Standardized World After All

All over the world standardized testing is a way to evaluate students on how much knowledge they have obtained throughout the years. Our school systems tend to evolve around these tests rather than the student’s learning experience. When educators focus on testing results they often lose sight of why the students are actually there; to be shaped into law abiding and well educated citizens. A few problems tend to peek out of the testing box, such as time and courses lost, technology and human errors often arise, risking standardized students rather than individuals, anxiety, and these tests do not show creativity or imagination.

Due to the time it takes to test students, teachers often lose valuable class time and neglect more creative studies. With colleges raising the bar on admissions, students pack their schedules with advanced classes and often neglect more creative ones. They could use the time that it takes to pass a standardized test and take a class that would go toward a college credit or one that would make their chances of getting into college more likely. When picking electives for high school, students often choose courses that appeal to them or help them get into a desired college. If these credits are being used on courses that prepare them for standardized tests they lose one credit that would help them get into that certain school. When you add up the time it takes to prepare for, administer, and pass the test, it is the equivalent of two or more courses. “It is the hours spent practicing types of questions that might appear on the tests and the days denying students enrichment options that are truly meaningful that make proficiency test to harmful and invasive,” as one educator put it. According to Peter Johnston, each year the average high school student loses approximately ten days in the actual testing process, not the preparing portion.

Believe it or not, technology is not perfect and a fault is very likely to occur. For example all the students’ scores could be misplaced, programmed incorrectly, wrongly graded or be given to the wrong students. In one case the testing companies identified an error on a 1999 administration of the SAT that lowered the scores of 1,500 students by as much as one hundred points (Sandham, 1998; Weiss 1998). McGraw Hill determined that a programming error caused the percentile rankings on the TerraNova to be too low at the lower end of the scale and too high at the upper end. As a result, approximately a quarter of a million students in six states were given the wrong national percentile scores.

Human error is present in all aspects and phases of the testing process. An Institute of Medicine (IOM) report entitled “To Err is Human” divides human error into active and latent. Active error is most familiar: an error committed by a specific individuals, often easy to identify, and the first to be noticed. Latent error derives from misguided executive decisions (so-called bad management decisions). The later error “poses the greatest threat to safety in a complex system because they are often unrecognized and have the capacity to result in multiple types of active errors” (IOM, 2000, p. 55). Hand-scoring on a 1999 A-level and GCSE exams in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland was found to be faulty for thousands of students. Six thousand grades were increased after students challenged their initial scores. This just goes to show that you can never be sure if standardized testing results are truly correct.

If we have more standardized tests, we run the risk of making more standardized students rather than individuals. With emphasis being placed on passing the ISAT’s, ACT’s, and SAT’s we often forget that most students do not wish to take these tests. The use of creativity and imagination is not a part of these tests. We must wonder if these individuals are less intelligent than their counterparts who test well but are without creativity and imagination. Somehow it does not seem right to have the efforts of students reduced to an hour or two test.

Teachers as well as students feel the impact of standardized tests. I was told once of a widely esteemed middle school teacher who was famous for helping students design their own innovative learning projects, stood up at a community meeting and announced that he “used to be” a good teacher. These days, he told, he just handed out textbooks and quizzed his students on what they had memorized. He also emphasized that he and his colleagues were increasingly being held accountable for raising test scores. Once teachers and students are compelled to focus on what the qualifications are for these tests, such as the number of grammatical errors in a composition or how much shorter Melvin is than Andrew by using the subtraction property, the process of thinking has been strictly