Why tests are bad

Such high-stakes testing can place undue stress on students and affect their performance. Standardized tests fail to account for students who learn and demonstrate academic proficiency in different ways. For example, a student who struggles to answer a multiple-choice question about grammar or punctuation may be an excellent writer. By placing emphasis on reading, writing, and mathematics, standardized tests have devalued instruction in areas such as the arts, history, and electives.

Standardized tests are thought to be fair because every student takes the same test and evaluations are largely objective, but a one-size-fits-all approach to testing is arguably biased because it fails to account for variables such as language deficiencies, learning disabilities, difficult home lives, or varying knowledge of US cultural conventions. Effects of Standardized Testing on Teachers Teachers as well as students can be challenged by the effects of standardized testing.

Teachers have expressed frustration about the time it takes to prepare for and administer tests. Teachers may feel excessive pressure from their schools and administrators to improve their standardized test scores.

Standardized tests measure achievement against goals rather than measuring progress. Achievement test scores are commonly assumed to have a strong correlation with teaching effectiveness, a tendency that can place unfair blame on good teachers if scores are low and obscure teaching deficiencies if scores are high.

Though multiple choice tests are relatively easy to create, they can contain misleading answer choices—that are either ambiguous or vague—or offer the infamous all-, some-, or none-of-the-above choices, which tend to encourage guessing. While educators often rely on open-ended questions, such short-answer questions, because they seem to offer a genuine window into student thinking, research shows that there is no difference between multiple choice and constructed response questions in terms of demonstrating what students have learned.

All students do not do equally well on multiple choice tests, however. Researchers hypothesize that one explanation for the gender difference on high-stakes tests is risk aversion, meaning girls tend to guess less. Giving more time for fewer, more complex or richer testing questions can also increase performance, in part because it reduces anxiety.

Test achievement often reflects outside conditions, and how students do on tests can be shifted substantially by comments they hear and what they receive as feedback from teachers. When teachers tell disadvantaged high school students that an upcoming assessment may be a challenge and that challenge helps the brain grow, students persist more, leading to higher grades, according to research from Stanford professor David Paunesku.

When you talk with the principal, come armed with examples of what you find troubling, what you find praiseworthy, and what you would like to see implemented.

Teachers and principals face constraints imposed by the law and state and district policy, but you can encourage them to make use of the wiggle room they do have. By the same token, let the teacher know when you see something you want to encourage — say, an innovation in class that excites your child.

For example, if there is too much test prep, ask that the principal monitor it and take steps to reduce it. I discuss other steps you might take in the final chapters of The Testing Charade. After that, I would work my way up. Contact the relevant district administrators and members of your school board, and again, be prepared to be specific about what you would like tamped down and what you want the district to encourage.

Doing this as a member of a group of like-minded parents might help. Skip to main content. An expert's lens on the failure of high-stakes accountability tests — and what we can do to change course. By: Bari Walsh. Posted: November 3, Can you offer a balanced framing of this for parents? In the current testing landscape, teachers have to spend a good deal of energy rallying the troops every year. Bad test prep, as you call it, can derail a class and block real learning.

How can teachers reframe this narrative, in the near term? What is an accountability system that works? What should parents and teachers be advocating for? To start, we have to measure what matters — what we consider most important for judging the quality of a school. Ask yourself: what do I want to see when I walk into a classroom?

The accountability system should give teachers credit for these. If you want to see classrooms that are engaging — I certainly do — then we should give teachers credit for creating them. Prisons come to mind. Standardized tests create stress. Some kids do well with a certain level of stress.

Other students fold. Brain research suggests that too much stress is psychologically and physically harmful. Standardized tests reduce the richness of human experience and human learning to a number or set of numbers. This is dehumanizing. A student may have a deep knowledge of a particular subject, but receive no acknowledgement for it because his or her test score may have been low. But not in a standardized testing room.

Tough luck. They were developed by mediocre minds. One of the pioneers of standardized testing in this country, Lewis Terman, was a racist the book to read is The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould.

Another pioneer, Edward Thorndike, was a specialist in rats and mazes.