by Jacob Moore

Created on: November 04, 2008   Last Updated: November 15, 2008

Standardized testing was never, and will never be, about education. Standardized testing has always been about ease, convenience, and affordability. The quick and easy scoring, and the organizational advantage provided by the ability to easily document the results made politicians jobs easier. The government needed to be able to grade the educational process in this country and they saw standardized testing as the easiest, quickest, most convenient, and most affordable way. What they didn't consider was the impact this decision would have on the actual educational process. This is one case, in which, the ends most definitely do not justify the means.

One of the biggest problems, yet probably the most overlooked, with standardized testing is the fact that the scores are unreliable yet they are still used to determine advancement. The scores are a tool used for organizational purposes and a measuring stick for the successes and failures of each school district. The scores, on an individual level, are inaccurate and useless for practical purposes. The problem arises because government officials are too invested in standardized testing to acknowledge the problem. They need the scores and information to make decisions and carry out the obligations of their job. To create a degree of validity, they had to make the tests mean something to the teachers and students. So they made the tests determine whether or not the individual student advances to the next grade, ignoring the fact that the only reason the scores mean anything to the politicians is because the impact of the errors is reduced by the humongous amount of scores being averaged. This problem sends a destructive wave through the entire educational process. The fact that the test scores determine the entire "success" of each course predicates how every teacher teaches, how every administrator administrates, what curriculum is provided, and what educational techniques are used. The teacher spends the entire semester teaching the test because it is so vital to the student's "success" which directly determines the teacher's, and the administrator's, and the school's "success". If it isn't on the test it doesn't get taught. And that is where the student loses out, because no one can be so naive to believe that everything the student needs to learn in any given school year can be included on one test. The theory might have looked promising, but the actual practice of the theory has broken that promise.

Another significant

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