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Are Standardized Tests Evil?

By: posted September 24, 2009

*this is an email i wrote to someone that does not like standardized tests.

Standards are not going away. Standardized tests are just a method of assessing the extent to which students and schools are meeting standards. There is no difference between a standardized test and a regular test other than how they are scored. We have used tests for in school standards since the beginning of education.

There is no option that will ever involve eliminating standards or the tests that measure them. The efforts of those wishing to do away with them would be far better suited to steering the standards and the methods we use to attain them. The number of these tests will increase every year and this will never end. The sociological reasons for this have to do with an ever increasing population size and the increasing complexity and difficulty in evaluating and comparing individuals and groups in the population. The only interesting option to me is getting us to the point where every student can easily meet the standards that we lay out as a society for what we expect someone to learn while in school.

Grockit’s vision is not about standardized tests. Our vision is one of collaborative learning and a technologically advanced learning platform for individuals, groups and experts. We believe this educational design is so powerful that it can help us get closer to a vision of every student passing standards. We also believe this vision is just as well applied to all forms of collaborative learning, not just standardized tests. We’ve even begun piloting Grockit in schools as part of a general learning platform that has nothing to do with standardized tests.

The problem in education is not standardized tests. It’s the system design itself. Industrialized mass education is a recent educational design that’s just over a hundred years old. It is a design that moves students through school as though it were a factory and teachers the factory workers. This design is the root cause of schools being boring and un-motivating for students. A better system design will get every kid passing standards.

Standards are, of course, necessary and useful. The problem lies in thinking that just by applying standards things will improve. That is to say that implementing a national and state level standardized testing plan will not itself improve standards. It’s the remediation of students that will improve standards and that has to do with educational system design, not the existence or not of standardized tests.

I think we’ll get a lot more mileage out of evaluating and re-designing our educational system and emphasizing collaborative learning than we will by eliminating or promoting standardized tests.

Categories: Uncategorized

  • http://www.tutorpedia.com Seth Linden

    Educators have argued about standards and standardized tests for years. Teachers constantly debate the value of learning “hard content” vs. “soft skills.” How do we measure what students learn? And more importantly, what should students learn? When studying history, is it more important to learn specific facts (when World War II broke out, where the major battles took place, etc.), or is more important to understand general ideas (what led to WWII, what effect did the war have on technology, education, politics, etc.)? When studying science, is it more important to learn how to balance chemical equations (photosynthesis: 6H2O + 6CO2 + sunlight = C6H12O6 + 6O2), or is it more important to understand the general idea that if we feed plants water, carbon dioxide, and light, they’ll give us glucose (sugar) and oxygen in return?

    My argument is not to do away with standards – we need to set high standards for all students, not just those in low-performing public schools, and not just those in high-performing private schools – ALL STUDENTS. This is an assumption that is lost among proponents of standardized testing; just because I don’t believe in standardized tests does not mean I don’t believe in standards. We just need to have different ways of measuring if students have reached these standards, and bubbling in a multiple-choice test in a timed situation is not the best way, and it certainly is not the only way, to do so. Not only have many studies shown the cultural biases of such tests, but these tests can also result in conflicting data. The stress and anxiety that comes from a timed, multiple-choice, pencil-and-paper exam (see the SAT, CAHSEE, and STAR assessments, just to name a few) do not show what students know and are able to do.

    The best educators – teachers, tutors, and parents – know that we all learn differently, so we must measure this learning differently: through authentic assessments. This can be in the form of narratives (using standard rubrics designed by teachers), exhibitions (public presentations of student work), and performance assessments (testing know-how, along with know-what). These are all ways to assess students according to their individual learning styles, be they auditory, visual, or kinesthetic.

    Combine these assessments with computer-based learning and student-centric technology (yeah Grockit!), and we will have successfully disrupted class (see Clayton Christensen’s “Disrupting Class”). Until we figure out a better way to measure student achievement, we will continue to waste millions of dollars on failed schools, failed tests, and failed policies that do more harm than good. Sure, authentic assessments – based upon high standards – will cost more money and take more time than sticking a piece of paper and pencil in front of a student, but consider the alternative: students held back, schools shuttered, and an entire generation of kids who think they’re dumb because a dumb test says so.