Standardized Testing is a necessary evil

[Leigh Thelmadatter]

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:

**Standardized tests do not test what students really need to learn .. such as critical thinking skills.

**Standardized tests are biased against certain socio-ethnic groups.

**Teachers wind up only "teaching to the test"

**The pressure these tests put on students is unfair.

There are more, but lets work with these.

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

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 compostion, 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.

3) Teachers and esp. administrators do worry more about whether what is going on in the classroom will help test scores. But the assumption behind this complaint is that teachers and administrators would worry about more important things if standardized test were scrapped. It is true that many would. For a really good discussion about what could be done see Education Reform and the Need to Mod at http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2009/02/education_reform_a... I, too, can identify with the frustration that comes with the restrictions on creativity and excellence placed by the need to prepare students for standardized exams.

However the sad fact is the the teaching profession is filled with the mediocre. Unqualified teachers, teacher who dont care, teachers who are burnt out and teachers more concerned about promoting their political point of view than teaching their subject (seen mostly in university). Behind them are schools who only care about tuition money and/or fundraising, teachers unions who care only about getting more money, and political correctness that forbids any discipline in the public schools and grade inflation that is out of control.

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.

4) As for the pressure arguement, the best response to that comes from "Standardized Testing Provides Good Gage For Future" " by Kyle Hoffer...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.

Standardized testing has been around for centuries. It was an still is the backbone of advancement in Chinese society, to prevent or curb nepotism. US civil service exams arent going away anytime soon either. Their use is nothing new and they have been proven to at least partially curb the shenanigans people do to get ahead.

But the real argument in their favor is stated best by Hoffer:

" 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."

Hoffer is writing about the SAT but the same logic applies to public school standardized testing. First of all, there are too many variables from one school to another and even from one class to another. One teacher may be concerned about whether his/her students learn and the other may only be concerned about his/her pension plan.

Standardized tests where around when I was in grade school, too. Sadly, that government puts more emphasis on these tests and more teachers complain about them so much is a reflection as to just how bad the educational system has become. Not only did I meet a lot of unqualified teachers (including myself during my first semester as a writing teacher at community college), but education schools are a joke. Those with the lowest qualifications attend these programs generally. When I did my masters in TESOL in 2003, the director of my program wanted nothing to do with the School of Education "as it would bring down his program's reputation". One reason I am not in academia is the disdain for the business of teaching and the idiotic politically correct arguments such as " there should be no grading at all"... which of course may just be a logical extension of rampant grade inflation.

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.

[Leigh Thelmadatter]

Agreed ... on all points. No standardized test will be perfect, but certainly if we are going to put such high stakes into them, they should be as of high a quality as possible. But to argue that we should abolish standardized tests because of their shortcomings, but offer no alternative as to how authorities outside the school itself should evaluate what students really learned is really an argument for no outside assessment at all.

I dont think the education establishment is ready for my kind of argument... yet. I think it will take education getting to a much worse state than it is now and another generation before we see any improvement again. Given what I have seen from my stint at Rutgers U (BA Linguistics) and U of Arizona (BA Spanish), Im not sure how much further higher ed at least can fall. Can you imagine the outrage if a government suggested a standardized exit exam for college?????? If we gave one right now, adapted for each major, along with some gen ed. stuff, how many would pass? Most college students today cannot write a decent 5 paragraph essay anymore... didnt that used to be a pre-requisite?

[Eric Roth]

Excellent post on multiple levels, and education needs to hear informed critics like you to rejuvenate and recreate itself for the 21st century.

Standardized exams, however, should also be much better and stronger - even if they cost more and take longer to grade. For instance, it's impossible to honestly assess language skills without a speaking and writing exam. We want - and we need - students to become active producers of language, not just passive listeners. Authentic assessments take time. The high stakes tests should also not be given by the classroom teachers since they have a clear conflict of interest if there are financial consequences to student test performance.

Finally, ideology has certainly played a destructive role in both the silly opposition to grading and standardized testing. That insight, however, doesn't excuse the poor quality of many widely used standardized exams that make bold claims without sufficient evidence. Take the SAT - which helped give me a full scholarship for college many moons ago. Despite ETS assertions for over 50 years, there is no evidence that high test scores correlate to the academic success of college freshmen. Does this mean abolish the SAT? Absolutely not. But it does mean ETS should make the test better - which it has done in the last few years under the real threat of being discarded by hundreds of elite universities. More improvements are needed.
As you know, many nations require serious content exams for high school graduation and college entrance. We could learn from the experience of some other very successful developed countries, and establish - and enforce - real educational standards.
Of course, such a possibility remains a very longshot.