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To everyone taking the ACT this year:

• Standardized tests don’t define you.

• Over 850 colleges in the U.S. have optional ACT score entry.

• If you fail you’re still intelligent

• Each test is 30-45 mins long, if you’re not nearly done with 5 minutes left it’s better to pick a letter and bubble in the remainder of that test. It only counts for every answer you get right, not wrong. So, better safe than sorry.

• Get a good nights rest

• Have nice meal in the morning, wake up early, be at your testing center before 8am and make sure you have your printed ticket.

• don’t forget to bring photo ID

MOST IMPORTANTLY…

Don’t panic, don’t psych yourself out because again:

Standardized don’t define you and failing them doesn’t mean you’re any less intelligent.

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Should we get rid of standardized testing?

Standardized tests are used around the world for everything from evaluating stair climbs for firefighters in France to language examinations for diplomats in Canada to students in schools. 

Some standardized tests measure scores only in relation to the results of other test takers. Others measure performances on how well test takers meet predetermined criteria. So the stair climb for the firefighter could be measured by comparing the time of the climb to that of all other firefighters. Similarly, the diplomat might be measured against other test-taking diplomats, or against a set of fixed criteria, which demonstrate different levels of language proficiency. 

Although standardized tests are sometimes controversial, they’re simply a tool. As a thought experiment, think of a standardized test as a ruler. A ruler’s usefulness depends on two things. First, the job we ask it to do. Our ruler can’t measure the temperature outside or how loud someone is singing. Second, the ruler’s usefulness depends on its design.

Say you need to measure the circumference of an orange. Our ruler measures length, which is the right quantity, but it hasn’t been designed with the flexibility required for the task at hand. So, if standardized tests are given the wrong job, or aren’t designed properly, they may end up measuring the wrong things.

In the case of schools, students with test anxiety may have trouble performing their best on a standardized test, not because they don’t know the answers, but because they’re feeling too nervous to share what they’ve learned. Students with reading challenges may struggle with the wording of a math problem, so their test results may better reflect their literacy rather than numeracy skills.

And students who were confused by examples on tests that contain unfamiliar cultural references may do poorly, telling us more about the test taker’s cultural familiarity than their academic learning. In these cases, the tests may need to be designed differently. 

Standardized tests can also have a hard time measuring abstract characteristics or skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. If we design a test poorly, or ask it to do the wrong job, or a job it’s not very good at, the results may not be reliable or valid.

Reliability and validity are two critical ideas for understanding standardized tests. To understand the difference between them, we can use the metaphor of two broken thermometers. An unreliable thermometer gives you a different reading each time you take your temperature, and the reliable but invalid thermometer is consistently ten degrees too hot. Validity also depends on accurate interpretations of results. If people say results of a test mean something they don’t, that test may have a validity problem. 

Just as we wouldn’t expect a ruler to tell us how much an elephant weighs, or what it had for breakfast, we can’t expect standardized tests alone to reliably tell us how smart someone is, how diplomats will handle a tough situation, or how brave a firefighter might turn out to be. So standardized tests may help us learn a little about a lot of people in a short time, but they usually can’t tell us a lot about a single person. Many social scientists worry about test scores resulting in sweeping and often negative changes for test takers, sometimes with long-term life consequences. 

We can’t blame the tests, though. It’s up to us to use the right tests for the right jobs, and to interpret results appropriately.

From the TED-Ed Lesson Should we get rid of standardized testing? - Arlo Kempf

Animation by CUB Animation

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Teachers: “standardized tests don’t work!”

Students: “standardized tests don’t teach us anything!”

Parents: “get rid of standardized tests!”

Pearson: “hey Governor, here’s $700,000.00”

Governor: “These tests remain the only way to truly ensure the proper education of our children!”

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The SAT was created by a noted racist and anti-immigrant activist who had previously written difficult, biased exams intended to prevent immigrants from becoming citizens. Happy test day!!

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The History and Basics of Standardized Testing

A standardized test is considered to be any examination that is administered and scored in a manner that is standard for all test takers. The two major kinds of standardized test are aptitude tests and achievement tests. Aptitude tests serve to ascertain the knowledge that students have incurred thus far, and whether or not this is sufficient for their next level of education. Examples of this include the ACT and SAT for college or university, or the GRE for graduate school programs. Standardized achievement tests are used by citizens and school board members alike to evaluate how well a school is educating its students.

The earliest form of the standardized test was administered in China, beginning around 750 A.D. “Imperial examinations” were used to test a student’s knowledge of the Six Arts, which encompassed topics such as music, archery, arithmetic, and writing. The purpose of these examinations was to select candidates for the state bureaucracy. This process continued for over a millenium.  

Because of their close ties with China in the early 19th century, British colonial administrators began to witness the merit of these tests. One such advocate was Thomas Taylor Meadows, who said that the British Empire must adapt these policies if the empire was to save itself from falling into ruin. At this time, Western academia was based on the skeptical and open-ended debate form of learning, as was practiced in Ancient Greece. Therefore, the first “European” implementation of standardized testing occurred in British India. British company managers used these tests to hire potential employees based on their merits, rather than allowing corruption and favoritism to prevail. It was not until the late 19th century that standardized testing became common practice in the British mainland.

From Britain, the practice of standardized testing spread to the immigration offices of America, where it was used to test social roles of immigrants, and to discern social power and status. However, it was not until the 20th century that standardized testing became a phenomenon in America, as seen in tests developed for soldiers during World War I. In 1959, the ACT examination was offered for the first time. State-wide examinations began in the 1970s, and spread nationally by the 1980s. The passing of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 further increased the spending for, and influence placed upon, standardized testing. In fact, after this law was passed, the annual state spending on standardized tests rose from $423 million to $1.1 billion by 2008.

Standardized testing can be used in several ways. As previously mentioned, tests such as the ACT and SAT can help determine a student’s college readiness. Other examinations may be used to place students into remedial or gifted programs at their schools. They can be used to compare schools throughout a certain state, or across the nation, and even help compare America’s performance to other countries. The main purpose of standardized testing is to determine academic achievement and potential across a wide range of areas, particularly focusing on student and teacher performance.

However, as helpful as standardized testing may seem, there is a lot of debate around whether it is an accurate measure of student success, student intelligence levels, and the level of performance being displayed by the instructor. In the next few weeks, we will discuss the pros and cons of standardized testing, as well as how Jupiter Ed can make the process of maintaining standardized testing records easier.

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The Cons of Standardized Testing

Expecting standardized testing to be a precise and accurate measure of educational success and student intelligence is not a productive way to establish future student success. Finland top the international education rankings from 2001 to 2008, despite the fact that they did not have external standardized tests to rank students and test education, and opt instead for assessments that can encourage students to be active learners to analyze significant, real-life situations in a thoughtful manner. However, standardized testing can be useful in certain situations, but only when considered to be rough approximations of teacher and student success. There are a certain other pros to standardized testing that may prove beneficial to schools and states, which will be discussed in the next blog post.

Despite the fact that standardized testing has been the norm for measuring academic success for the past 30 years, the numerous flaws of this system have been blatantly obvious from the beginning. As with anything that tries to fit several different types of people into a specific category, one of the main arguments against standardized testing is that it homogenizes learning in a way that is not beneficial to students that do not work well under the “drill and grill” method of education. In fact, most students are not successful learners in that environment. Students learn in a variety of manners, and some are better at giving written explanations to their reasoning for reaching an answer to an ambiguous question.

One problem with standardized testing is that it is difficult to actually standardize a testing situation across the board. For example, a mathematics exam is given to fourth grade students across an entire state on a particular day in April. Throughout this entire day, one classroom may be drastically colder than a classroom at another school, causing students to focus more on their discomfort than the test itself. An underprivileged student may not have had access to a nutritious breakfast that would allow their brain to be more alert and high functioning during the exam. A student may be suffering through seasonal allergies, or be under the weather in general, but did not want to miss the test because of the importance placed upon it. If a student actually does miss a test because of something such as a death in the family or illness, the student is given the chance to “make-up” the test on a later date, and will be given a test with questions that differ from those their peers were given, therefore causing the student to suffer an unfair advantage or disadvantage.

Standardized testing is changing the subjects on which schools place the most importance. Teachers are feeling obligated to focus on reading, mathematics, and science, while subjects that encourage creativity and self-expression, such as theatre and art, are being placed to the side. A national 2007 study by the Center on Education Policy reported that since 2001, 44% of school districts had reduced the time spent on science, social studies and the arts by an average of 145 minutes per week in order to focus on reading and math. A 2007 survey of 1,250 civics, government, and social studies teachers showed that 75% of those teaching current events less often, cited standardized tests as the reason.

Also, by only testing the limited amount of knowledge that schools have the time to teach, students are losing fundamental building blocks of their ability to think both critically and empathetically. According to late education researcher Gerald W. Bracey, PhD, qualities that standardized tests cannot measure include “creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity.” These qualities are essential to success in college and the real world, but are not able to be measured in a quantitative manner.

Standardized testing is also quite costly. Since the adoption of No Child Left Behind, these costs have increased even more. The Texas Education Agency reported that it spent $9 million in 2003 on standardized tests, while it was estimated that the cost to Texas taxpayers would increase to around $88 million per year beginning in 2009. A new report found that some states spend approximately $1.7 billion on state testing each year. When figuring in administrative costs, the price of standardized testing per student can equal almost $1100.

Another troublesome aspect of standardized testing is that it is used to develop a correlation between student performance and a teacher’s ability to present information. If students did not adequately prepare themselves before an exam, and then proceeded to perform poorly on the exam, blame would be placed upon the student’s instructor. Also, in an effort to create a variance between each standardized test, questions that many students answer correctly are not used on tests in subsequent years. Therefore, the topics that students learn the best are not able to be used to as an indicator of instructor success.

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Of course I am against standardized testing, but this is a great post to show the pros of standardized testing. I can see the other side of the argument clearly and I can understand where they are coming from.

The Pros of Standardized Testing

The argument against standardized testing is becoming stronger each day. As mentioned in the previous blog post, many believe that it is limiting the breadth of knowledge that students are exposed to, making them unprepared for life outside of high school and college. However, despite all of the nay-sayers, there are those who remain strong advocates for standardized testing and its effects on the education system.

One of the largest complaints against standardized testing is that it narrows the curriculum that teachers can cover in their classrooms, as they are forced to teach the material that they know will be on end-of-year standardized exams. Some in favor of standardized testing argue that “teaching the test”, can be beneficial to students because they are able to become more proficient on a smaller amount of essential topics for college and career readiness. Students do not have to waste time learning information that is inessential to fully comprehending a certain topic.

According to a peer-reviewed, 100-year analysis of testing research completed by Richard P. Phelps, a testing scholar, 93% of studies on high-stakes standardized testing found that testing had a positive effect on student achievement. This evidence is corroborated even further when considering that China has been utilizing the practice of administering standardized tests for over 1000 years, and its students are the highest achieving in world, displacing Finland’s students in the Programme for International Student Assessment rankings of 2009. Schools that use frequent, standardized testing to monitor progress have achieved greater gains on national and international assessments.

Standardized tests are also great for obtaining an approximate understanding of how well students are performing in necessary subjects, which can assist in determining if there needs to be a change in curriculum, or how the teacher presents learning materials to their students. It is easy to see why many may find standardized tests as a useful measure of student success. Standardized tests may be given uniformly, so that states and government authorities may know exactly which knowledge each student was tested on. This helps prove the validity of certain assessments that may be drawn from the results of such tests.

So while standardized testing may be quite painful and seemingly pointless to some, there are also several benefits to this education practice. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, standardized testing is an established norm in the American education system, and is here to stay for a while. However, if you live in a state that participates in the Common Core, then the opt-out program may soon be an option. Therefore, we are able to receive all of the benefits of standardized testing without placing such high stakes on teacher and student success. 

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Author, Noliwe M. Rooks, points out great reasons why standardized testing is the best method for all students.

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Just My Opinion

Hey I just have a quick question for all of my viewers. If all students are different when it comes to the ability of learning, why should the all be tested with the same exact tests?

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This author has an interesting approach of standardized testing. They have created a study on standardized tests based on international students coming to the U.S. for further education beyond high school!

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Check out this article!

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A little bit of Controversy

This post will explain to you three controversies that are very important to the world of standardized testing. There are so many more than three controversies, but we will go into depth with three. The first controversy and major argument is a very simple but an important one. Is it improvement. That’s the key to really anything in life. People are always trying to improve and the question is being standardized tests allowing us to improve as society in education. The debate is very difficult because you have studies showing improvement, but then there’s studies that show no improvement who has the right answer? That is part of the controversy. The next controversy is also very serious. Are the students taking the testing serious? On a personal experience when I was younger everyone took the testing serious, but as you get older most students in my school did not take it serious. This could certainly show an in accurate representation of the academic achievements. This makes a big difference if kids are taking it serious because then it is just a big waste of time. Then people believe the children do take it serious so once again were put up in a pretty big controversy. The next controversy that is another serious issue. The question is being these tests preparing the children for college and ultimately the real world or can we find an alternative route that would find more success. This issue is very important because if it is not properly preparing students once again it’s a waste of time, money, and it sets us back as a society. These three issue are very important to standardized testing. There are so many more issues, but these are three that really stick out and I think it’s important to recognized them. I also believe the problem is we are too busy arguing over all these issues instead of fixing them.

If you take a look at this reading it has a lot of great material to look at that will help better understand the topic. (click here)

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Standardized Testing Costs States $1.7 Billion A Year, Study Finds

What is one thing whether we like it or not that our world today revolves around? The thing that probably popped into your head is money. The world revolves around money and everyone wants some of it. Well how does money relate to standardized testing you might ask. Something that should be taken into consideration is how much does standardized testing cost.

In 2012 per The Huffington post a study finds that the Standardized testing industry costs states 1.7 billion a year. On November 29, 2012 after a chunk of research shows there were plenty of articles also supporting these numbers supported. In the article Standardized Testing Costs States 1.7 Billion A Year, Study finds the study used was from the Washington based Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. The spending was based off 44 states and the District of Columbia and those all reached the number of 669 million and after the other states are considered the number of 1.7 billion was reached. Each test has a different cost for each state. For example, New York is $7 per student, Oregon is $13, Georgia ($14) are the lower sates. Then the higher costing states such as Hawaii reaches up to $105 and the District of Columbia reaches $114. These numbers vary quite a bit all over the country, but the main point is the money it is costing.

Now, what is the point of explaining this article to you? Well after reading these posts you have been shown ideas all revolving around the question of should there be standardized testing. so here is another idea to take into consideration about your opinion on the topic. Is standardized testing worth 1.7 billion dollars in our country. Is our education system getting 1.7 billion dollars of production from these tests? The number 1.7 billion is a huge payout and very few people have that money. Take into consideration could that budget be reduced and then there is money to budget into other things. One idea that strongly crosses my mind and needs to be thought about is finding another strategy. There must be a way to find a successful strategy that creates educational progression through the students without it costing 1.7 billion dollars. I am all for putting money into our education system because that is one of the most important things within society, but is a test worth 1.7 billion dollars?

Click here to read the article.

The Huffington Post is an online news resource “Standardized Testing Costs States 1.7 Billion A Year, Study finds November 29, 2012″ claims that the standardized testing is costing the states 1.7 billion dollars a year. A study done by Washington-based Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution calculates 44 states costs 669 million and after calculation the other states the total reaches 1.7 billion. The Authors purpose is to inform you on the price that standardized testing is costing our country. Because of the informative style the author is directing this to the general audience who has no prior knowledge of the price of standardized testing.