Standardized Testing Argumentative Essay

There’s no doubt that challenging, high-stakes tests can provoke anxiety in some students. According to Bright Hub Education, some school systems are under great pressure to raise their scores so they have resorted to decreasing time spent in recess. This can have negative impact on children’s social, emotional, and academic well-being. Furthermore, people who are against standardized testing argues that often times, standardized tests try to fit all students in certain categories and oppresses them too much. But, perhaps counterintuitively, the solution to this problem is not to get rid of testing; instead, it is to encourage more testing – particularly frequent, lower-stakes testing. With many tests spread out across the year, each individual

It is understandable, since standardized tests are not the great equalizer that will eliminate discrimination. There was a research that even SAT tests, which is widely used as a part of American college admissions process, are in favor of students with certain personalities. However, it is highly unlikely an individual teacher alone could create a fairer, less biased test than many experts with access to a lot of resources, a huge amount of diverse data, and the ability to refine tests based on those data. As stated in the ETS video, once a new question is introduced, statisticians work to figure out whether it’s performing equally well for different groups. Unfair, biased questions are certainly an important ongoing issue for the makers of standardized tests to address, but much work is going into the refinement and improvement of these questions, with the goal of avoiding and, hopefully, eventually eliminating such biases. All individuals have implicit biases that are almost impossible to override, so leaving assessment to individual instructors can only worsen the problem. The crux of the matter is trust – can we trust a board of experts that includes experienced teachers to act in our best interest as a nation of educators, parents, and children? And if the answer is no, then how can we trust individual teachers, and how would we hold them