Standardized testing in educational settings is used to measure student achievement and instructional effectiveness, as well as to make decisions. Although everyday classroom tests, if everyone is asked the same questions and their answers are graded the same way, are standardized tests, this is generally discussed in terms of externally created tests that are given at the end of a school year or at the end of high school. In some countries, passing a national exam is necessary to get a high school diploma or to be admitted to a university.
Annual standardized tests at school Standardized testing is a very common way of determining a student's past academic achievement and future potential. The validity, quality, or use of tests, particularly annual standardized tests common in education have continued to be widely both supported or criticized. Like the tests themselves, supports and criticisms of tests are often varied and may come from a variety of sources such as parents, test takers, instructors, business groups, universities, or governmental watchdogs. Supporters of large-scale standardized tests in education often provide the following reasons for promoting testing in education:
Feedback or diagnosis of test taker's performance: Standardized tests allow teachers to see how their students are performing compared to others in the country. This will help them revise their teaching methods if necessary to help their students meet the standards. Students are given the opportunity to reflect on their scores and see where their strengths as well as weaknesses are. The scores can allow parents to get an idea about how their child is doing academically. Fair and efficient. Each test taker will have the same amount of time to complete the test. Every answer and overall grade for a standardized test is evaluated identically, therefore reducing potential bias in the scoring system. Promotes accountability: Standardized testing is used as a public policy strategy to establish stronger accountability measures for public education. The idea behind the standardized testing policy movement is that testing is the first step to improving schools, teaching practice, and educational methods through data collection. Proponents argue that the data generated by the standardized tests act like a report card for the community, demonstrating how well local schools are performing. Critics of the movement, however, point to various discrepancies that result from current state standardized testing practices, including problems with test validity and reliability and false correlations (see Simpson's paradox). Prediction and selection Improves performance Critics of standardized tests in education often provide the following reasons for revising or removing standardized tests in education:
Poor predictive quality. Grade inflation of test scores or grades. Culturally or socioeconomically biased. Psychologically damaging. Poor indicator of intelligence or ability. Furthermore, student's success is being tracked to a teacher's relative performance, making teacher advancement contingent upon a teacher's success with a student's academic performance. Ethical and economical questions arise for teachers when faced with clearly underperforming or under-skilled students and a standardized test. In her book, Now You See It, Cathy Davidson criticizes standardized tests. She describes youth as "assembly line kids on an assembly line model," meaning the use of the standardized test as a part of a one-size-fits-all educational model. She also criticizes the narrowness of skills being tested and labeling children without these skills as failures or as students with disabilities. Widespread and organized cheating has been a growing culture. There are three metrics by which the best performing countries in the TIMMS (the "A+ countries") are measured: focus, coherence, and rigor. Focus is defined as the number of topics covered in each grade; the idea is that the fewer topics covered in each grade, the more focus can be given to each topic. The definition of coherence is adhering to a sequence of topics covered that follows the natural progression or logical structure of mathematics. The CCSSM was compared to both the current state standards and the A+ country standards. With the most topics covered on average, the current state standards had the lowest focus. The Common Core Standards aim to fix this discrepancy by helping educators focus on what students need to learn instead of becoming distracted by extraneous topics. They encourage educational materials to go from covering a vast array of topics in a shallow manner to a few topics in much more depth.
Time and money Standardized tests are a way to measure the education level of students and schools on a broad scale. From kindergarten to 12th grade, most American students participate in annual standardized tests. The average student takes about 10 of these tests per year (e.g., one or two reading comprehension tests, one or two math tests, a writing test, a science test, etc.). The average amount of testing takes about 2.3% of total class time (equal to about four school days per year). In the US, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is the largest K-12 federal education law, which provides education to disadvantaged children. The reauthorization of this Act in 2002 by President George W. Bush mandated annual mathematics and reading tests of students in third through eighth grade and the data from these tests would be available to parents, educators, administrators, and policymakers in the form of report cards. Standardized tests are expensive to administer. It has been reported that the United States spends about US$1.7 billion annually on these tests. In 2001, it was also reported that only three companies (Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill and Riverside Publishing) design 96% of the tests taken at the state level.
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