Should Nathan Kuncels Do Standardized Tests Matter?

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Those Tests
In Nathan Kuncels’ speech “Do Standardized Tests Matter?” the question is raised why is a person successful. Is it because of their biology, opportunities, or just luck? The second question he asks is how can we measure potential success? He argues that standardized tests are a reliable source. Not only are standardized tests not a good measure of potential success, they don’t prepare students for life outside of school, may suppress creativity, and they don’t get most students excited about learning.
First off, there’s just more to life than standardized tests suggest. Some may argue that standardized testing prepares students for leadership roles in the real world, but I would like to ask how? In life rarely do we come across …show more content…

The ability to transcend traditional ideas and to create meaningful new ideas” (blog.grodge.org). While some argue that being able to identify the “best answer” is another measure of creativity, it actually limits creativity. Standardized tests leave no room for creative, out of the ordinary solutions because they are looking for a certain answer. If a student has a better solution than the options given for the question asked, and they write it down on the side of the test bank, their answer will be marked wrong. The student, upon receiving their score, may begin to think that creative answers are not acceptable and become discouraged because the test scores were lower than expected. A former teacher, Ron Maggiano, who won the Disney Teacher Award quit his job for this very reason he is quoted as saying, “I can no longer cooperate with a testing regime that I believe is suffocating creativity and innovation in the classroom. We are not really educating our students anymore. We are merely teaching them to pass a test. This is wrong. Period” (washingtonpost.com). To prepare students for these tests school curriculums have become centered around teaching kids how to do well on the test. Projects and other class activities are cut because more time must be spent on test prep. So not only are the tests not testing creativity, but teachers aren’t teaching in

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