More testing causes students to stress and it lowers their creativity.
Increase in testing can cause kids to have more stress. I understand the need for testing but I think increasing the amount of testing will mean we will have to learn more, which means we need to memorize more, and which will cause students to stress over trying to memorize everything. It also causes the teachers to teach us to get ready for the test, rather then teaching us things we will use beyond our middle/high school education. It seems ridiculous to test us to get us ready for a test when we are just going to forget most if not everything we learned after we pass the test we tested for. For example with teaching us the format to write an essay will not help us beyond school because because there is not many jobs that you will have to write in that format. With that I am not saying that we should not have writing tests but we should be able to write on a topic we enjoy so it can show that we are good writers.
I believe that our testing is lowering the level of creativity through out the grade levels. When we write we should be taught to write short notes not long essays because most jobs do not require us to write long essays. If we should write essays I believe we should be able to write about topics we enjoy so we can show that we can write well because of we are given a topic it can limit our thought process because even with resources we still do not know much about the topic. So, therefore we should if we have to write essays at least be able to pick the topic we write about so we can really show our writing skills and we are not limited to a topic we do not know much about. If a student fails a test that can cause students to think low of themselves because they did not pass the test so it can make that student think they are stupid, dumb, etc. With so much testing the students have to have a lot of homework and with that comes less time to enjoy our adolescent years and more time for us to be stressing about all our tests. With the time students have to take out of their day to go home and study is ridiculous and some tests are so hard that a passing grade could be a 35%. What is the point of making students take a test at the beginning of they year to show what they know, when the teachers are going to expect low grades on them because the students have not been taught the material. All tests are just to see what students can memorize and some students could have really bad memorization skills. So, therefore no matter if the student gets a good grade on the test they will go and forget everything in a few days.
Even though I think there should not be an increase in student standardized testing, I do see why some people would want an increase in testing.
They are a good measure of a students achievements but that means the teacher was teaching to that test rather then teaching useful things like how to pay taxes, how to use stocks, etc. They are a good college preparation but we could also just teach students what is to come in college rather then having to take a bunch of tests.
Standardized tests measure only a small amount of what makes education meaningful. Teachers spend so much time teaching to the test that they don't really give students enough time to take what they are teaching into their long term memory. For the students that need extra help, they are not given any extra time to learn the material they have to take the same tests as students who can learn the material more efficiently. Instruction time is being consumed by huge amounts of test preparation. Some schools could even be using more then an entire quarter of the school year just for test preparation. Multiple choice tests are not a good way to show what students have learned because many students can just guess and get a passing grade. All this testing costs so much money and that is money that could be used to pay teachers more and for the students to have new textbooks and materials. Many students do not even need most of the material they are being taught for the career they may want to pursue. The government should design tests in ways that discourage narrow teaching. The government should also carefully evaluate the effectiveness of any new incentive program pursed.
According to late education researcher Gerald W. Bracey, PhD, qualities that standardized tests cannot measure "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, and integrity." Also the multiple-choice format used on standardized tests is an inadequate assessment tool. It encourages a simplistic way of thinking in which there are only right and wrong answers, which does not apply in real-world situations. The billion dollar testing industry is notorious for making costly and time-consuming scoring errors. The format is biased toward male students, who studies have shown adapt more easily to game-like point scoring of multiple-choice questions.
So I believe that we should not have standardized testing because it lowers students creativity and it causes students to stress. Also it may cause teachers to cheat the system and students to cheat on their tests and test preparation can take away from class time that could be used to learn useful things like how to pay taxes, pay mortgages, keep a job, manage your time, keep your home space clean, etc.
