Standardized Tests Are Bad

I really hope anybody who reads this blog takes the time to read this article, from 2000, entitled “Standardized Testing and Its Victims“.

I’ve often tried to convey how terrible standardized testing has made the current educational atmosphere.  This article shows how little progress has been made in the last decade.  In fact, I’d argue it’s much worse since there’s even more emphasis on tests, test scores and data.

It’s late and I’ve been dealing with quite a bit lately, so I won’t go over it point by point.  Here are the two main points in the article that I agree with most:

1. Norm-referenced tests were never intended to measure the quality of learning or teaching.
2. Standardized-test scores often measure superficial thinking.

Those two are tied together in an important way.  Even though the tests were not made to measure teaching, they are being used to rate teachers.  So teachers teach more and more test-taking skills and other low-level “skills” to prop up test scores at the expense of other material and higher-level skills.

Try going off topic for even one class period if you have an end-of-year subject test that all students MUST pass or else No Child Left Behind pulls funds.  How can you waste the time?  You have to spend at least a month (A MONTH!) reviewing for the test.  We are wasting weeks and weeks of class time preparing for one test.  Instead of doing that, why don’t we have time set aside so students can explore, do labs, ask questions, get off-topic and ultimately find something they are interested in?