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THE
SILENT TIMER™
Handbook
Standardized
Tests
No matter how old you are,
you’ve taken one. Your best friend’s taken one. Your doctors, teachers
and even your parents have taken one. You’ve probably taken several of
them. Whether it’s to advance grade levels, obtain admission into a college
program or determine your eligibility to become a lawyer, there’s no avoiding
standardized tests.
According to the Handbook
for Measurement and Evaluation in Early Childhood Education, a simple set
of criteria classifies these inevitable exams:
- They include specified
procedures for administration and scoring.
- Test items result from
experience by experiment or observation rather than theory.
- They have an established
format and set of materials.
- They present the same
tasks and require the same response modes from all test takers.
Common standardized tests
include the BAR Exam, ACT, SAT,
LSAT, MCAT, GRE and
GMAT. Middle school and high school students must also take
state standardized tests. Students are trained from early adolescents to take
these exams—they are unavoidable.
Much controversy surrounds
standardized tests. Experts from different sides debate how effective the tests
are in truly measuring students’ intelligence and whether they’re
a fair tool for students spanning across extremely diverse backgrounds.
The primary argument of
those favoring standardized tests is that the test results can be quantified
and compared. Grade point average scales and level of academic difficulty differ
from school to school. What is a 3.0 at a highly-academically ranked school
might be a 4.0 at a school not as academically challenging. Because there is
no common method in evaluating students, standardized test scores are aimed
at providing academic institutions a universal scale in which to measure students’
knowledge and skills.
Parents, educators and politicians
also like to use standardized test to determine how successful a particular
school is teaching various subjects. Teachers are encouraged to base their curriculum
plans around the students’ strengths and weaknesses derived from the tests
to increase scores.
The public also generally
feels better going to a doctor or lawyer that has passed a legitimate skill
and knowledge test. Who wants to have open-heart surgery performed by someone
whose skills aren’t based on a common measuring ground? For all you know,
Dr. What’s-his name could have graduated from Coo Coo Medical School.
On the other side of the
argument lies those opposing standardized tests claiming that the exam scores
are not a true measurement of intelligence and exclude artistic skills and critical
thinking. At the forefront of the line is the National
Center for Fair and Open Testing that doesn’t think standardized tests
are fair and helpful assessment tools because they reward the ability to quickly
answer questions not involving an actual thought process. A big part of its
views on standardized testing is that the only objective part of the exams is
the scoring done by a machine. Everything else, such as the questions, question
wording, determination of the “correct answer” and rules, is done
by subjective human beings. The center urges that good teacher observation,
documentation of student work and performance-based assessment will much better
determine students’ abilities.
Maybe someday proponents
from both sides will be able to come together and reach some sort of agreement
on a universal way to measure students’ abilities, but until then standardized
tests seem to be the only obvious alternative. Learn
more about the pros and cons of standardized testing.
Relevant Links
Education
Testing Service
What's
wrong with standardized tests?
Discrepancy
between SAT and ACT
Graduate
School Admissions Tests
List
of Standardized Tests for College Admission
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