Standardized Testing: Good or Bad?
Education is the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge. We all crave knowledge, we all learn new things every day, and we all make decisions based on our knowledge. It comes to no surprise that a major part of our lives is education, from pre-k to graduate school. Being successful in our education consists of hard work, a little luck, and now, more importantly than ever, being able to pass exams. Tests are one of the only ways to see how well we understand a subject and in many instances, can either make you or break you. Testing, however, should be based on the individual, where differences in the way students learn should be taken into account. As of several years ago, however, our education system has moved away from this individual approach, and has adopted a broad and general way to measure success: standardized testing. We have all taken standardized tests at point in our lives, be it the FCAT or the SAT which had a huge influence on which colleges we were accepted to. There is no argument that standardized testing does have its advantages, such as allowing schools and states to compare their education systems to one another, however, standardized testing being implemented as a major factor in our education has overall had a negative impact on education. The use of standardized testing in deciding whether a student passes or fails is simply wrong. Standardized testing should not be implemented into our school systems because it has been shown to be very bias and unfair towards certain groups of students, has not been shown to correlate with an increase in learning, and has narrowed the curriculum into a more drill-like curriculum, all which have hurt not only education as a whole, but every student who has been forced to take them.
Standardized tests, by definition, is a test that is fair for all