standarized education

Standarized Testing in Education

By: Silvia Andrea Tarazona

 I had always heard the term standard in several fields, but honestly I did not really know what it referred to. When I started to work as a teacher I was asked to apply a standard test to a certain group of students that were selected “randomly” by the directives, aiming to get a high-quality certification.

What I found surprising, was that first, the certification was for the institution not for students, second, they were not really chosen randomly as they had stated, because they were the students that had obtained the best grades during the whole year. Third, I started to wonder about the rest of student… I mean if standard tests are designed equally for each student, are they supposed to know the same things even if they learn in different ways?... Are the education stakeholders giving priority to administrative purposes and academic certifications for schools instead of pedagogical approaches and students´ needs?....well, there is a lot of things to be debated about standardized education so here you can read my list of cons and pros of it, based on the presentation that my classmate Jorge gave in class about this topic.

Pros:

 Standardized testing in education is accompanied by a set of standards which provide teachers with guidance for what and when something needs to be taught. Without this structure a third grade teacher and a sixth grade teacher could be teaching the same content. Standardized testing is an objective procedure. Classroom grades given by a teacher are not subjective at all since those tests are scored by computers or by people who do not know the students.

Cons:

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1.    Standardized testing evaluates a student’s performance on one particular day and does not take into account external factors, such us anxiety, understanding, their particular needs, etc. Additionally, Standardized testing only measures the individual performance of the student instead of the overall growth of that student over the course of the year.

Standardized testing leads teachers to teach for the test. This practice can delay a student’s overall learning potential. Because they are being trained to perform exams not to learn for the sake of it.