Are standardized tests helpful to students?

The intent of standardized testing is to have large numbers of students take one test and then compare any score against all others to see how an individual's score compares to the large sample. Standardized means the test is the same in three ways: format/questions, instructions, and time allotment. Creating a standardized test and interpreting the results requires a lot of different expertise in curriculum, child development, cultural and linguistic differences, statistics, and psychometrics.

Standardized tests have a significant influence on students, teachers, and districts. These yearly exams do not help educators plan daily instruction since they are infrequent, contain broad content, and are slow in returning results to inform. However, standardized tests can provide benefits like communicating information about students' achievement status. There are several reasons why standardized tests are supported and opposed.

Objective Data

Standardized tests are supposed to be an objective measurement of learning that gauge areas for student, teacher, and school improvement. They assess students on similar questions under nearly identical testing conditions and are graded by a machine or blind reviewer. Many states even employ psychometricians to ensure fair testing for all students. This is thought to provide the perfect setting to gain objective data that reflect student learning. However, some believe standardized tests only determine which students are good at taking tests and offer no meaningful measure of progress.

Each state develops its own standardized tests, which means they are not necessarily comparable across state lines, leaving nationwide statistics shaky at best. Standardized tests may contain several questions about material that the students have not been taught. Districts require teachers to teach topics while not knowing which topics will appear on the test. Test creators also play a significant role in student scores. They produce questions that may not be answered correctly by many students. Questions that are answered correctly by more than 60% of the students are usually removed from the test.

When deciding which questions to use, test creators try to find questions that only the top 50% of the students will get right. These questions are prevalent in standardized testing because they support the common testing theory where the highest achieving students answer the questions correctly. If a concept is taught to all students in a class and all students answer the question correctly, the question will not be used in the future since it does not spread the students' scores so the fine-grained norm-referenced numbers can be associated with each student. Put more simply, there must be questions only answered by about 50% of the students for comparisons to be made. Using a system like this already sets the students at a disadvantage while testing. Additionally, the students must also worry about outside factors that can make testing more challenging.

Outside Factors

Test creators do their best to create tests using objective data that give students the greatest opportunity to score well under the same testing conditions. However, many outside factors like stress, hunger, tiredness, and prior teacher or parent comments about the difficulty of the test can disrupt some students during testing. Environmental factors can also play a role in the students’ ability to test. The testing conditions may cause students to miss questions not because they do not know the material but because they were in a room with poor lighting that caused headaches in students or because the room was too cold, which did not allow students to focus.

Students who are poor test-takers because of nerves associated with tests may not be able to show what they can accomplish in the high-stakes atmosphere of standardized testing. Those students suffer from test anxiety, meaning that they do not perform at their usual level because they find the experience of test-taking so stressful. Even students who usually are good test takers can have skewed results. Evaluating a student’s performance through an impartial test can negatively affect graduation rates if low scores demoralize students.

The students’ scores are not even being used to determine the effect of the previous year’s learning. Instead, each “state currently reports yearly change by comparing the scores of this year’s students against the scores of last year’s students who were in the same grade. It says much more about the change in who the students are because it is not measuring the growth of the same student from one year to the next.” Students’ scores being compared to the previous year’s scores do not help educators determine what the current students have not been learning over time, leading to educational deficits. These learning deficits already exist for many marginalized groups of students who are doing their best to catch up to their peers.

No Child Left Behind

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) showed the college and career readiness of high school graduates, and the test results quickly showed enormous gaps in proficiency between students of color and their white peers. In response, states became concerned about student achievement and the gaps in achievement between different types of students and began using the test results to evaluate the quality of schools, districts, state departments of education, and even teachers.

NCLB created the goal of 100% proficiency by the 2013-2014 school year, which made many states lower standards and make tests easier to pass so they would still receive federal funding. Additionally, NCLB placed unrealistic demands on schools serving high-needs communities and a culture of “drill and kill” test preparation that took away the joy of school and learning. For these reasons and more, in 2015, the law was reauthorized again as the Every Student Succeeds Act, which removed annual benchmarks and added flexibility for states to decide how to hold themselves accountable. But states still had to share individual district and school test results with the public to showcase which schools were performing well and which were falling short.

Marginalized Groups

Standardized tests produce data that help ensure students in marginalized groups perform to the same standards as their peers. However, some people believe that standardized tests are racist, classist, and sexist. A student’s socioeconomic status is highly correlated to standardized test scores, and this is likely due to the tests being skewed to reflect the learning that children gain at home. There was a famous example in the 1990s when an SAT question asked for the best analogy between “runner” and “marathon.” The answer was “oarsman” and “regatta,” vocabulary that might only be familiar to wealthy teenagers.

Additionally, standardized tests often misrepresent the academic abilities of English Language Learner (ELL) students and students with special needs. Testing modifications were created to combat this. However, the tests are not designed to help them succeed. Opponents of standardized tests argue that anyone who deviates from that ideal, for whatever reason, is automatically at a disadvantage.

Standardized test results are one the most compelling indicators that show the glaring inequities in our current education system. A report by brightbeam found that in San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math, compared to only 12% of Black students. This pattern, white students vastly outperforming black students, is rampant in many parts of the country and emphasizes America’s challenge of raising achievement and infusing equity into our schools. The data gained from standardized tests is used to close the gaps in education because it provides a clear way to measure how well school systems serve students most at risk and give states and school districts the data needed to create more equitable systems.

When teacher perceptions are the sole criteria for student access into gifted and talented programs, students of color are often ignored. Research shows that more students of color are selected for accelerated learning when standardized testing is used instead. Standardized tests can perpetuate racial inequity and system racial bias. Yet without them, students can only be tested using subjective assessments. Testing companies have initiated programs to create tests and learning materials that are culturally, racially, and socio-economically sensitive. In 2021, Pearson, a major textbook publisher and standardized testing vendor, published editorial guidelines addressing race, ethnicity, equity, and inclusion.

Tools for Evaluation and Funding

The data collected from standardized tests are used to evaluate students, teachers, districts, and states to evaluate the quality of education. Additionally, the results of standardized tests are used to allocate funding which leads to people skewing the results to gain more funds for their schools. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which tied extra funding for disadvantaged students to state compliance, was reauthorized in 2003 as the NCLB. States had to annually assess student learning through standardized tests (grades 3-8 and once in high school) to receive the extra funding and leave out test results of historically neglected groups, like students with disabilities, English-language learners, and low-income children. Each group, school, district, and state were required to meet an Adequate Yearly Progress benchmark. Doing so has only caused a further gap in the education of minorities and their peers, all for money.

School administrators, districts, and states can compare teachers using test scores to show how they helped their students master core concepts. Timothy Hilton, a high school social studies teacher in South Central Los Angeles, stated, “No… teacher would use a single student grade on a single assignment as a final grade for the entirety of a course, so why would we rely on one source of information in the determination of a teacher’s overall quality? The more data that can be provided, the more accurate the teacher evaluation decisions will end up being.” However, it is difficult to assess teachers on how well their students tested when there is almost always a substantial difference between what is taught and what is tested.

Another major argument is that dependence on test data to measure student performance negatively impacts teachers’ ability to teach. Standardized testing at the end of the school year can disrupt a teacher’s curricular plan and force them to teach less relevant material to their students. Similarly, many teachers find constant testing over the year to be disruptive and unproductive to student learning. Because standardized testing data is a matter of public record, it affects funding for public schools. However, many private schools are exempt from state and federal testing requirements which means they do not test as often. Meanwhile, public schools that face more significant challenges can be cut off from the state and federal support they need if their test results are poor.

What should we do about standardized tests?

No single test can accurately measure a student’s proficiency in math, science, reading, and social studies. However, these tests can observe different groups of students, help districts understand which students are struggling and what instructional changes should occur, and show educators the right solutions to the issues students face. Without the test, teachers and parents would not be able to measure their students’ learning. Current standardized tests have many problems that need to be fixed to accurately gain the necessary information to truly help students succeed. State education systems need to invest in innovating our testing infrastructure to minimize the time and money spent on assessments. They also need to stop taking money from schools that do not perform as well as others. Those schools need the money more than the others to help get their students to the same level as their peers.