By Julia Balli, Copy Editor
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, adjusting the three yellow No. 2 pencils so that they all would align on my desk. I didn’t really understand what was going on, I just knew we had to take a big test, the Iowa Test.
I’ve never been very good at taking tests, so I was nervous. That unfortunate day was the day I was required to take my first standardized test, aka the day that my own personal gates to pure agony swung open.
The No Child Left Behind Act was put into effect on Jan. 8, 2002. Congress passed this act basically because they were concerned that the United States was falling behind academically on an international level. To ensure that this did not happen, they thought it would be a good idea to begin testing students throughout their K-12 school career. Standardized tests were administered to display what level students are perceiving information taught in class, to see if they can adapt to new and challenging situations, and to measure a student’s intelligence overall.
No child left behind, right? Well, wrong. This child was left behind.
I remember getting my results back from the test, and I remember how I felt when my friends told me how they did. “How did you do,” they all asked me. “I can’t remember,” I lied. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone how I really did, which wasn’t bad, but because I scored lower than all my friends, that made me really insecure. Why didn’t I get a higher score? I came to the conclusion that I’m just dumb. I never considered myself dumb until that test.
In fact I was doing just fine before I had to take these standardized tests. Not only did these tests ruin my confidence, they have come back to taunt me for the rest of my educational career. For example, the ACT, the most inaccurate standardized test ever created in the history of mankind. This single test defines my whole entire high school career, and pretty much determines which colleges I get into or not.
Working hard and having a decent GPA? Who needs that when you can take a singular test that shows how “intelligent” you are. Heck, some schools completely disregard all of your hard work and won’t even look at you if you don’t get their required ACT score.
I really do not see the need for standardized testing. It does more harm than good. Standardized tests were designed to portray a student’s intelligence, but these tests miss the point entirely. Standardized tests fail to recognize a student’s most essential learning requirements, such as levels of creativity, initiative and commitment. It just focuses on the basic learning targets like math, English, and science.
Take Finland for an example. Finland has one of the best educational programs in the world. Finland does not require students to take standardized tests, except for one when they are 16, compared to the United States which requires standardized testing throughout our whole entire educational career. This leads America more towards a “teaching to test” kind of environment instead of actually “teaching to teach.”
I’m not saying we get rid of standardized testing as a whole, just make it less rigorous, like Finland has it. It would make for a less stressful school environment. School should feel less like a competition and more about learning for the sake of learning.