Standardized Testing

Reasons Why Standardized Testing Is Below Proficient A high school student is required to take seven standardized tests, achieving a cumulative score of 18 while earning a minimum of four points in math and English and six points across science and social studies in order to graduate in 2018 and beyond. (Ohio Department of Education, “Graduation Requirements 2018 And Beyond”). Students in schools throughout the country, both private and public, can spend weeks, sometimes even months, preparing to take these assessments. Many teachers spend more time than they would prefer informing their students of different test-taking tips, and providing multiple practice assessments and study guides to review. Once it is time to actually begin the standardized …show more content…
Starting in third grade, students will take a total of twenty-three state assessments until they graduate high school (Ohio Department of Education, “Ohio's State Tests In English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science And Social Studies”). Many students manage the stress that comes along with such a high amount of testing in different ways, such as learning to stop caring about the assessments. Required to take a minimum of two tests per year, a lot of children realize that the easiest way to relieve themselves of the stress attached to the assessments is to no longer care about how well they will score. Regardless of the student’s score, there will inevitably be another test waiting around the corner. This can then affect the students inside the classroom as well, causing them to become less likely to stay involved in the learning process. For example, in her literacy narrative, Shannon Nichols, a college student at Wright State University, discussed her own poor experience with standardized testing in high school and how it negatively affected her performance in the classroom. She loved writing, considering it to be her strongest subject, but she failed the writing portion of a standardized test multiple times, which surprised her teachers, as well as herself. Nichols did not understand why she failed the test, and she had to take …show more content…
In reality, the state does not truly know how the students learn, the teachers do. “So trust the teacher. Publish grade distributions. Locally publish a compilation of evaluation reports. Release a state or national report reviewed and verified by expert evaluators with legislative oversight” (Jouriles). A progressive step towards a similar direction already exists, but it has rarely been implemented. In New York, an alternative option to high-stakes testing is the New York Performance Standards Consortium. The Consortium contains twenty-eight public high schools in New York that focus on project-based learning as the base of their curriculum and use “practitioner-designed, student-focused” assessments. Four required “performance-based assessment tasks” allow students to express what they have learned by: analyzing literature, using mathematical principles to solve a problem, writing an analytical paper about a historical idea, and performing an original scientific experiment and writing a research paper based on the study. Students can defend all of their work orally and the work is also reviewed by an external expert panel. Internships are also viewed as a critical part of learning and are assessed via student presentation, which educators and external experts assess with rubrics to determine the quality of students’ work (Alternatives To Annual High-Stakes Standardized Testing). This alternative

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