What do you think about standardized testing?

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Originally Posted by blackcrystal22

Hmm.. Ignorance.
My boyfriend received a 35 out of 36 on the ACT, putting him at the highest standards. I received a 24, and many of our friends received between a 22-30. Heres the thing, many of my friends took pre-ACT study classes to get a better score. Me and my boyfriend did not. He didn't want to, and I could not afford to.

I do relatively good in school. Averaging mostly A's and B's in normal classes with a few scattered Cs. He gets straight A's in all of his honors classes and AP classes.
The thing that severely bothers me is that he will never study for a test. Not once. He doesn't even study for finals and he gets A's every time. I study for weeks before a final and usually barely come out with C's.
Want to know why? I am a bad test-taker, because of the way I use my brain. There is not something wrong with me, I just retain information with pictures and he retains with words. I can not memorize sentences or dates or numbers like he can, but at the same time, he struggles with Art, Creativity, and doing Projects, which I generally excel at.

Some people have different way's of retaining information. Sadly, most schools only use words and numbers to teach which makes me struggle quite a bit. I don't think they will have anything to do with your life in the long-run but they will slow things down for you now. Don't think college just bases their acceptance on tests. One of the seniors who went to my school and got a 36 with a high GPA was declined from MIT and Cal Tech, there reasoning was they wanted someone more creative and open-minded. Go figures. ;)

Edit: I don't know if you noticed, but that also means that your calling me stupid, the OP stupid, and anyone else on this forum who doesn't test well stupid. How nice of you.

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funny how that works. i was the opposite. the one with no future, who failed in school but scored extremely high marks on standardized tests, retaining information that is often totally meaningless, but recalled verbatim. i think the whole concept of education in this country is flawed. if it makes you feel better to pretend that i'm "picking on you", do so. i did not call you stupid, nor did i say that a low test score proves the lack of intelligence. as you said, there is not something wrong with YOU, but the way YOU perceive things.

i recall pictures, not words, definitely sounds. standardized tests are pointless because there is no standard human being. testing should be replaced with better means of teaching, so that a greater number of people are able to that "standard" level of understanding.

Standardized tests are something you need to learn to do well at in order to succeed in many things. Giving them earlier and more often is doing kids a favor in a way - hopefully by the time you need to take SATs, GRE's, bar exams, etc - kids will be practiced at these types of exams.

I'm not saying standardized tests are a good thing or a bad thing, just that they are there and in the way if you want to go to college or get professional licensure....so get used to it and practice!

this year in a test they had a work that had nothing to do with it.. it was asking you what gullible is and what it means.

The way all standardized tests are currently set up, they teach students nothing but how to jump through hoops. Students never learn to love learning for its own sake; they are only motivated by fear of failure and they forget everything they learn as soon as it isn't required to know it any more.

I think any standardized tests before SAT/ACT are completely unneccisary. Some kind of standard is unfortunetly needed to admit students to higher educational institutions though, otherwise everyone would be crying foul when they aren't accepted because their school "didn't provide good enough curriculum", making it the school's fault when they are turned away.

The only other solution I can think of to this problem would be to standardize all the curriculum in all schools across the country, which would of course be impossible because of budget differences and differences in instructor's teaching styles.

I haven't been in school since long before most of you were born. Even my children are over the age of 30. So I can't say that I am familiar with the content of current standardized testing. But back when I took such tests (we had them but they weren't the sole factor in determining whether you passed or failed a grade) they were always multiple choice questions (aside from math problems) with four possible answers. Two of the answers would be so absurd that they were easy to eliminate. Of the remaining two, generally one answer made more sense than the other if you took the time to think about it. These test gauged your reasoning and problem solving abilities, which are generally skills that need to be developed. People that did poorly on the tests either never developed these skills sufficiently or were just so poor at reading that they couldn't understand the questions. I have heard recently on National Public Radio that these tests have had the questions revised many times over the last couple of decades in an attempt to eliminate bias against different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that were perceived to be at a disadvantage when taking these tests. Even so, there are identifiable groups of people today that do worse than other groups on these tests. According to NPR the Social Scientists that have been fiddling with these tests are now beginning to think that parental concern and involvement in the children's lives may be the single most determining factor in whether the children develop the skills that are necessary to do well on these tests.