Problems With Standardized Testing

With this emphasis on getting good testing results, many teachers decided to sacrifice teaching critical thinking and advanced problems, and instead substitute the minimal knowledge that is needed on a standardized test. For example, a seventh grade teacher will try to perfect students' ability to use the Pythagorean Theorem in order to obtain the measurement of sides and angles of a right triangle. But on the other hand, real life applications and word problems of how the Pythagorean Theorem can be used to find unknown distances and heights, as well as angles of elevation, will be less of a focus because there is less of a focus on longer and wordy problems on standardized tests. An educator needs the freedom of having time …show more content…
The American College Test and Scholastic Assessment Test, commonly known as the ACT and SAT, are both standardized tests used to determine a student's academic knowledge and skills in order to identify which level of colleges and universities they can handle. The ACT Inc. calls their test an indicator of "college and career readiness" and college boards trust their numbers to reflect just that. Although it is known that college admission boards take into consideration many other factors, such as grade point average, extracurricular involvement and class rank when accepting and rejecting applicants, it in inevitable that students are still turned down because their standardized tests reflect that they are not "ready." As a result, high schools all over the nation put great emphasis on these college admissions tests that are administered nationwide to each high school junior. It is true that standardized testing is a method for colleges to rank and then select students by expressing each student's capability as a number. This number is useful because otherwise it would be very difficult to rank such a diverse group of people, each with his or her own strengths and achievements in different fields. Although this solves the problem of having to weigh the significance and precedence of each individual's past …show more content…
For years, tests such as the SAT, have been attacked by reviews such as the Harvard Educational Review and Princeton Review that claim they are a "white preference test." According to such critics of the CAT exam, Cognitive Ability Test that is administered to younger students, it has, "become a virtual truism that the average performance of racial and ethnic groups (especially Blacks and Whites) on CATs differs, sometimes by as much as a standard deviation (Helms)." There are numerous statistics that indicate the gap between test results based on culture and race due to the content of such tests. It is possible that race and culture are outside factors that come into play when students take standardized test; however, it is important to keep in mind that this is still a pending debate as studies try to determine the validity of this statement by examining it from different economic and psychological