Cyerra Pemberton

Prof. Madden

ENG 1201 Online

17 July 2019

Standardized Tests: The Effects

Students across the world are made to take several standardized tests throughout their

education, but what do these tests actually accomplish? As a student myself, I have taken many

standardized tests with high-stakes, and these tests caused immense amounts of test-anxiety,

stress, and fear in my life. They used much needed time, and caused my mental state to change in

ways that I didn’t know something school related could. These experiences caused me to wonder

how these tests affect other students. Are their experiences anxiety-ridden rooms of computers,

with nails being bitten to the root, and hands trembling? Students all over the world are made to

take these tests, and the tests do not help them in any way, as research shows. Students should

not be made to take standardized tests as they are now, because of the alienation of students in

minority groups that occurs during testing, the stress and anxiety the tests cause, and the time

taken away from learning real-life skills due to preparation for these tests.

Standardized tests are a form of test which requires all students to answer the exact same

questions, or questions coming from the same selection of questions, and they are scored in a

consistent manner (The Glossary of Education Reform). These tests are commonly associated

with high-stakes, which is when tests are used to make important decisions about students,

teachers, administrators, or anyone else who could be involved in the process. Many government

officials argue that standardized tests provide accountability by making teachers and students

measure up. Some common examples of high-stakes standardized tests in the U.S. are the MAP,
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the PARCC, the STAR, and many other state and local tests. Many in the U.S. and across the

world have complained about how these tests do not measure up. There are arguments against

the tests, including that they do not include students of wide varieties, they do not accurately

assess students’ skills, and they keep teachers from teaching other skills needed in adult life. The

list of arguments against standardized testing goes on-and-on, with a never-ending supply of

evidence to show how harmful it can be. These tests can keep students from going to college, or

from getting into a college very important to them. They can send students into panic attacks,

and even cause physical issues such as headaches and vomiting... Among the many arguments

against standardized tests, there are three that stand out the most, the first being the alienation of

minority students.

Many testify that minority students, many within racial minorities, are alienated through

standardized testing. These tests serve as more of a goal they cannot achieve than a way to test

knowledge for many of these students. Graduation requirements in high schools usually include

some form of high-stakes testing, which these students are generally not prepared for, holding

them back from graduating or going to college. For students who are immigrants or do not have

English as their first language, tests can be inaccessible in some cases. This keeps students from

ever having a chance to pass the test, let alone perform well on it. There have been increased

amounts of dropouts of Mexican-American students in many states in the Midwest, which can be

explained partly by the testing issues. In his article, “Scholars Say High-Stakes Testing Deserves

a Failing Grade,” D. W. Miller writes that minority students are getting cheated, (Miller). Many

have commented on the topic similarly to Miller, showing a widespread concern with the issue.

Minority students should not be alienated or feel that they should have to drop out of school due

to high stakes testing.

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In the state of Texas, which is thoroughly focused on in this section of Miller’s work,

there is a high-stakes test called the TAAS. This has been consistently argued against. In his

article, Miller says that scholars agreed that high stakes tests damaged teaching in classrooms,

and caused many minority students to drop out of school, (Miller). The dropping out of minority

students affects many lives. These students, after dropping out, are not provided with the

opportunities they may have had if they would have stayed in school. In his article “The Testing

Emperor Finally Has No Clothes,” Bruce Dixon says, “[f]ar from helping to ‘close the gap,’ the

use of standardized testing has been found to be most damaging for low-income and minority

students,” (Dixon 47). This damage Dixon mentions can cause life-long struggle due to dropping

out of school.

Students should not have to face these struggles because of standardized testing. Dixon

says standardized testing “penalizes diversity,” (Dixon 47), and it does. In a study discussed in

G.F. Madaus and M. Clarke’s “The adverse impact of high stakes testing on minority students”

students were evaluated with a focus on gender-related performance, low-income status,

linguistic differences, and special needs (Madaus and Clark 13-14). The study found that

students from low-income families, students who spoke English as a second language, and

special needs students had significantly lower scores than majority students (Madaus and Clark

13-14). This evidence shows how background and circumstances can affect a student’s test

scores, and this can later affect the course of their life. Standardized tests should be changed or

abolished in order to fit the needs of every student, not just those in the majority.

Another reason that standardized tests are toxic is the amount of stress and anxiety these

tests place on students. Many students experience severe test-anxiety, and this can be very

detrimental to mental health. In a study performed by Natasha Segool et al., proof was gained
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that students’ anxiety rates go up while taking high-stakes standardized tests. In, “Heightened

Test Anxiety Among Young Children” children in grades 3-5 were examined for how their test-

anxiety levels increased during standardized testing. In a comparison to the anxiety levels of

students during regular classroom testing, many students felt more anxious when taking a

standardized test. (Segool et al. 494-495). This provides scientific basis to show that students

will most likely feel more anxious than normal during these tests.

Fig. 1. This image shows how many students can feel overwhelmed while taking standardized

tests with the phrase ”S.O.S.,” which can indicate a need for help, (Bhagwat).

On another note, anxiety can be shown with visible signs. According to Tonya Moon et

al., in their text “State Standardized Testing Programs: Their Effects on Teachers and Students,”

standardized/high-stakes testing can affect students in many ways. They found that students

taking tests showed many physical signs of stress, including headaches, stomach aches, crying,

and sleep-deprivation (Moon et al. 81). These are a few of the many effects that teens face when

dealing with standardized and high-stakes tests. Are tests really making students sick? If so, why

is this accepted in society? For any test to cause this amount of trouble to a student there must be

a problem. A teacher spoke on this stress, saying, “The pressure on my kids just before the tests

is outrageous… Those who fail… tell me openly that they're ‘stupid, dumb, and are gonna drop

out’... I spend eight weeks trying to rebuild self-esteem,” (Moon et al. 81-82). These tests take so
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much time out of students’ lives that could be spent on positive things, and puts it to experiences

that are not pleasant whatsoever, and students should not be made to go through this. These

increased stress-levels and the pressure to do well can affect students’ long term mental health.

As mentioned earlier, many students have lasting self-esteem issues after performing below their

goals on a standardized test. Issues with mental health are serious, and should not be marked as

less important than the accountability that standardized testing enforces on teachers and students.

Students already face so much pressure in school and in life, that they should not be burdened by

pressure to live up to expectations on a test. By changing the tests to make them achievable to

every student, and to make it seem attainable to students and teachers alike, there is a great

chance that anxiety rates in students will go down.

The final reason that standardized testing is harmful to students is the time it takes away

from education about real-life. While teachers are made to teach content that goes into these

tests, there are many topics of adult-life that are left out. In an interview with Anya Kamenetz, by

Drake Baer, titled, “Here's how standardized tests like the SAT have poisoned America's

classrooms,” topics that are not covered in schools due to testing are discussed. When asked why

standardized tests are a problem, Kamenetz responded that schools need the ability to educate

students to be innovative in order to prepare them for the changing workforce. According to her,

schools are not teaching students this skill. This lack of teaching is not any fault of the teachers,

as they are made to teach students about many topics that prove to be irrelevant in real-life, just

so their students can pass these tests. Students should be taught more real-life skills.

The standard of education in the present is not enough to keep up with the ever-changing

job scene in America. As new jobs arise in many technology-based fields, education must change

to prepare students for careers. In the interview, Kamenetz goes on to say that, “for students to be
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able to do jobs that don't exist today, … centralized planning and an outdated set of

measurements to try and reach that outcome is going to be misguided at best,” (Kamenetz). This

supports the idea that a student being made to learn information specifically for standardized

tests is not productive for adult life. Students should have access to education that will help them

prosper post-education, and this form of testing is only holding them back.

There are many arguments that standardized testing is crucial to education. One that is

common is the idea that standardized testing is essential to know what needs improvement in our

schools. This ties in with the accountability aspect of standardized testing. The argument is that

people need to know what they are doing wrong in order to fix it. This argument is not valid in

many ways. First, students are usually never given back their answers to test questions. They

receive an overall, categorized score for subtopics in each school subject, but are never actually

given the sections of the test that they received below average scores on. When students are not

given the access to the questions they did not do well on, how should they know what to improve

on? Being told that one is not proficient in English is not specific enough to plan out how to do

better. Another reason that tests cannot show what needs improvement is that students are not

tested specifically enough to their personal goals. No one student is the same, either their

learning habits, progress, or grades. When every student is tested with the same test, there is not

enough personalization in the questions to know how a student analyzes each part of the test.

Testing does not show what needs improvement, other than showing very basic patterns which

do not help students.

Standardized testing is also argued to motivate teachers, as they commonly embrace test

scores. This, in turn, should benefit students with more engaged learning. From the many sources

referenced, teachers do not like standardized testing, and do not support it. It does not help
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students to be productive, but quite the opposite, according to many teachers. In the article,

“‘Crying real tears’: Educators testify about the toll of standardized testing,” by Kayleigh

Skinner, several teachers’ views of standardized testing are shared. Many teachers say that this

testing places, “an intense amount of stress on teachers and children,” (Skinner). Standardized

tests cause unwanted and unneeded stress in many lives. If these tests cause so much stress, are

they really helping teachers to be motivated to help students learn?

There are alternatives to standardized testing that can be explored within the educational

world. In the Anya Kamenetz interview, Kamenetz brings up a very important form of

alternative to standardized tests. This is called predictive analytics. This is a method commonly

used in advertisements, but in education, it would be used in a different way. Kamenetz says that

instead of testing students, which interrupts the learning process, predictive analytics would be

analyzing data about students each day, and testing them without them even knowing. This

would inform those around them of what they need to improve on without making the students

feel bad, (Kamenetz). This could serve as a much more productive form of assessing students,

without stressing them out so much or interrupting their schooling for tests.

In an article written by Anya Kamenetz, an author mentioned above, she introduces many

alternatives to standardized testing. In her article titled, “What Schools Could Use Instead Of

Standardized Tests,” another alternative to the traditional system, called sampling, is included.

This could serve as a compromise between those who support standardized testing and those who

don’t. Sampling is where standardized tests are still taken, but only by select samples of students.

Not every student would take the test, and it would be given to different students every year.

According to Anya Kamenetz, with this sampling approach, districts could still administer tests

to certain groups of students, receiving the accountability they want, (Kamenetz). This would
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provide data about how students are doing academically, but it would not stop the educational

process for every student, or multiple times a year. This system allows learning in its true form,

where people can engage instead of becoming zombie-like while studying.

Also in Kamenetz’s article, she includes a form of assessment called stealth assessment.

This alternative, according to Kamenetz, could give teachers and school-districts access to

information such as how quickly students learn, and other important factors in their education,

(Kamenetz). This type of assessment uses digital software that tracks students’ progress day to

day, and it is practically unnoticeable. It shows much more accurately how a student excels in

every aspect, not just the questions on standardized tests. It would not interrupt students in any

way, and would be quietly monitoring their progress in the background. This is a very viable

option, but has not had much testing done yet due to arguments over testing.

One thing that proves to be very important to standardized testing is accountability of

teachers and students. A way to test this accountability is by using multiple methods of surveying

students, as well as some tests, to make the blow less painful when a student does not do well on

a test. Instead of a student’s graduation depending on one test, Kamenetz says that, schools

would use data from many sources, such as graduation rates, teacher assessments, workforce

outcomes, etc., (Kamenetz). These results would be gathered over a period of time. By

improving areas in a school as a whole, students will end up receiving benefits as well. Student

surveys on social and emotional skills, game-based assessments, and portfolio based assessments

could also be options. Social and emotional skills surveys could provide feedback on how

students are progressing in developing skills needed in adult-life, such as, “grit, perseverance and

curiosity,” (Kamenetz). This could show teachers how to better work with their students in order

to prepare them for adult-life. Game-based assessments would provide data about systems
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thinking and high-order thinking. They are formatted like a video game, and are more engaging

while assessing things that a traditional standardized test would not. Portfolio based assessments

provide data about individual students on their own journeys. Kamenetz says that schools who

have implemented this, according to Kamenetz, have achieved higher graduation and college-

retention rates, (Kamenetz), which would be productive for all students.

Government inspections could also be used to keep schools on track. In Scotland,

Kamenetz says, there have been government inspections of lessons, schools, presentations, etc.

since 1833 (Kamenetz). This has proved to be a successful system for Scotland, and it maintains

accountability which government officials and standardized test supporters want. This system

keeps a consistent eye on every school, making sure that they meet standards established by the

government. This would keep students from having to do so much testing and allow them to

learn more in place of preparation for tests.

There are ways to make standardized testing better, or to abolish it completely, without

losing the accountability it gives. Kamenetz and many others have provided several alternatives

to testing that need to be researched further and most-likely should be implemented in schools

upon further research. Through implementing some of these alternatives, students could have a

chance to really excel in school. They will not constantly feel the pressure to measure up to their

peers on an academic level. With these alternatives, those in minorities would gain a fair chance

to succeed. These forms of assessment come with much less stress, and leave the time for

students to learn how to be an adult. Alternatives to standardized testing are the way to go if

people want the state of education to improve.

While standardized tests are very common, and required in most states, they are not

necessarily beneficial to students. Students such as those who come from low-income families,
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racial minorities, disabled students, and gender-comparative victims all have on things in

common when it comes to standardized tests: They do not have any positive effects on them.

They are subject and prone to scoring lower on standardized tests than those of majority groups,

and are looked down upon due to test scores that are already against their favor, even prior to the

administering of the tests. Stress and anxiety levels, as well as self-esteem issues and doubting of

self-worth all come along with standardized testing for students. Students are faced by an ever-

changing world and workforce, and standardized testing does not prepare them well enough for

these conditions. Standardized testing can be changed for the better, and other alternatives can be

put in place to try to fix the broken system. Standardized tests do not need to be completely

abolished, just given attention in order to fix what is broken in the system. People must open

their eyes to the possibilities, which could help students of all ages in many aspects. Students of

all backgrounds deserve a better, more equal chance to succeed. By implementing some

alternatives presented by those who state their concern, state officials may be able to help

students tremendously. Standardized testing can be fixed, but it cannot be allowed to remain in

this state.
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Works Cited

Bhagwat, Neel. “Standardized Testing And why it should be banned.” odyssey. Odyssey, 15 May

2017, www.theodysseyonline.com/standardized-test. Accessed 28 July 2019.

Dixon, Bruce. “The Testing Emperor Finally Has No Clothes.” Education Digest, vol. 83, no. 9,

May 2018, pp. 45–50. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=128750078&site=ehost-live.

Accessed 19 July 2019.

The Glossary of Education Reform. Great Schools Partnership, 2014, www.edglossary.org.

Accessed 19 July 2019.

Kamenetz, Anya. Interview by Drake Baer. Here's how standardized tests like the SAT have

poisoned America's classrooms, 7 May 2015, www.businessinsider.com/anya-kamenetz-

the-test-interview-2015-5. Accessed 18 July 2019.

---. “What Schools Could Use Instead Of Standardized Tests.” Modern Learners. Public Affairs,

Jan. 2015. Accessed 21 July 2019.

Madaus, George F., Clarke, Marguerite. “The Adverse Impact of High Stakes Testing on

Minority Students: Evidence from 100 Years of Test Data.” 2001. ERIC.

eric.ed.gov/?id=ED450183. Accessed 19 July 2019.

Miller, D. W. “Scholars Say High-Stakes Tests Deserve a Failing Grade.” Chronicle of Higher

Education, vol. 47, no. 25, 2 Mar. 2001, p. A14. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=4145482&site=ehost-live.

Accessed 17 July 2019.

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Moon, Tonya R., et al. “State Standardized Testing Programs: Their Effects on Teachers and

Students.” National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, National Research

Center on the Gifted and Talented, May 2007. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=ED505375&site=ehost-live.

Accessed 19 July 2019.

Segool, Natasha K., et al. “Heightened Test Anxiety among Young Children: Elementary School

Students’ Anxious Responses to High-Stakes Testing.” Psychology in the Schools, vol.

50, no. 5, May 2013, pp. 489–499. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/pits.21689. Accessed 20

July 2019.

Skinner, Kayleigh. “‘Crying real tears’: Educators testify about the role of standardized testing.”

Mississippi Today, Mississippi Today, 22 Jan. 2019.

mississippitoday.org/2019/01/22/crying-real-tears-educators-testify-about-the-toll-of-

standardized-testing/. Accessed 6 July 2019.