Standardized testing is the most ridiculous form of testing ever created. It was obviously put in place by the laziest person ever because it is the easiest way to grade a very large number of people without really testing how smart they are. It does test how good someones memory is and how well they can parrot what has been drilled into them without allowing them to analyze anything. It does not allow kids who learn differently show that they are just as smart as kids who have been taught how to take a test. There are kids whose needs are not met by these "standard" tests because they are bad test takers, don't understand questions, learn different. If we want to really find out what kids know and test them, which is what we want to do, we should do it at lower levels with people who know the kids and know how they learn and where they are in life. The higher these tests go the less people care about the kids and the more they care about results, and that is not the way people should be treated, much less the future of this country.
Who is the standard anyway? There is no Standard.
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Hey man. I definitely agree with you that standardized testing is pretty silly. However it is difficult to imagine any other way of testing peoples knowledge on a large scale. I feel like we need to have some type of bench marks in place. Some way to compare schools. So far, standardized testing is the only way I can think to do that in our traditional ways of educating people. The only way to do away with it would be to do away with our traditional views on education.
ReplyDeleteoops! I wasn't finished!
ReplyDeleteAlright. Where was I...I think there is a chapter in the book that addresses the idea of schooling and learning being a unique process. Some students just can't sit still for 8 hours a day, taking notes, and listening to lecture. These students were meant to learn in different ways and to express themselves in different ways. Maybe their dancers or actors or painters. That's awesome. In our current system, however, you can not test people on the creative arts without running into some major problems of consistency. I think we should have standardized tests...but that we should only give them to schools that focus on that type of learning. That means that we should develop a new way of schooling kids. One where we have specialized schools in place to send children to who are struggling to learn in the "normal" classroom environment.