Arguments Against Standardized Testing

Alexander Delatorre Ms Morrison English 10 12 April 2024.

Teenagers and children love to rant about how bad standardized testing is, and for good reason. Standardized tests such as the SBA (Smarter Balanced Assessment) have been around in most states, including Washington State, since the spring of 2015. Each year, students in grades 3-8 and 11 take two tests, a literature test and a mathematics test. The literature test consists of analyzing passages, answering questions, and even writing an essay at times. The mathematics test simply provides a long array of multiple-choice questions or word problems, where the student will have to calculate answers for hours straight. This is where the problem begins, throwing all these questions at a student and expecting them to know the …show more content…
Students are given a day for each topic, which is not a considerable amount of time for someone to genuinely put thought power into their responses. Plus, if the SBAs don’t affect students’ grades directly, these teenagers will do anything they can to finish it the same day, as missing just one day of class can put students back centuries. Anyhow, even after all the research proven against standardized testing, many people still support and advocate for this testing. The primary argument they support is that it gives the federal government an overview of the average success and intelligence of schools around the country, and the government determines school funding based on these standardized test results, so it “has to be accurate”. Pro-testing advocates tend to believe that this is the only reasonable way to determine a school’s growth in learning so that the government can fund a school accurately, as if they don’t test, then how else would they get a census of knowledge? This is false in many ways and illogical. First off, just because the government says something is true doesn’t remotely mean that they are right,

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