Why Do Students Use Standardized Test Scores?

Students all over the nation are experiencing delays to learning. Whether children are poor or in low class families, have low school funding, are being discriminated against because of their standardized test scores, or are being tracked throughout their entire school career, they are not getting the best education they possibly can. A lot of schools are having difficulty with the No Child Left Behind law because it forces students who have learning disabilities and English as a second language students to take standardized tests. Not only is this not fair to the learning disabled students and students who don’t primarily speak English, but this will also drop school’s test scores. In order for all students to get the best school experience
Tests make me very nervous and I find myself to do poorly even on multiple choice tests because I would over analyze everything in the question. Standardized tests made this fear of tests sky rocket for me and many other students. My worst subject in school is math, so of course on math tests I was anxious. When I took the SAT’s and got to the math portion of the exam, I could barely pay attention. I was constantly thinking about how every answer was going to affect me in the long run and could possibly ruin my chances of getting into a good college. I had to take the SAT’s twice because my first score was not nearly good enough. Standardized test scores should not count nearly as much as they do. With standardized test scores being one of the determining factors of college and moving up by grade, students’ abilities in other academic and creative areas are being
Meier says “across age groups, standardized tests discriminate against low-income students and students of color.” (2007) So just because a student happens to be black and in the low class, they’re automatically going to do worse than the student who is white and middle or upper class. There’s absolutely no sense in that at all. Every child has the potential to do amazing things and standardized tests only discourage students who don’t do as well on them; especially black, lower class students. If these students know that their tests scores are lower because of the way their family’s income is or because of the color of their skin, it would make them not want to do as well in school. Why would they? It doesn’t matter if they get every single answer right because they have points off for being black and poor. Meier also makes a great point by saying “two false assumptions…one is that standardized tests are a valid measure of excellence. The second is that standardized tests can be used to improve education, especially for low-income students and students of color.” (Meier, 2007) These statements are clearly false because not every subject and other things learned in schools are on standardized tests. And if a black, low-income students test scores are lower than a white, high-income student, then how will standardized tests improve education?