Have you ever felt anxiety when it came to taking a test? Have you ever spent nights studying for a test and, when it came time to take it, you didn’t do as well on it as you thought you would?

You are not alone.

The College Board and other educational organizations founded standardized tests in 1926, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The SAT lasted 90 minutes and consisted of 315 questions that focused on vocabulary and basic math. By the end of World War II, enough universities accepted the test that it became a standard right of passage for college-bound high school seniors and was given the name SAT.
Although standardized tests are intended to evaluate a student’s knowledge and ability in specific areas of study, testing a student on one particular day only evaluates the student’s performance in that period of time and does not take into account external factors. It also causes unnecessary stress and anxiety.
Joseph Spector’s article “Common Core Tests Giving Kids Anxiety, Psychologists Say” reports on findings in New York State, related to the stress that students now face in the high-stakes world of testing. Spector writes, “About three- quarters of psychologists from the state’s nearly 700 school districts said state tests are causing greater anxiety than local assessments.”
Spector also notes that the anxiety created by testing manifests itself in different ways in different age groups. “The report contended that the test anxiety is more common at the elementary-school level, saying students more often showed ‘internalized’ symptoms such as excessive worry and withdrawal rather than demonstrating ‘externalized’ symptoms, such as increased irritability, frustration and acting out.”

Add to this increased stress a lack of diversity in the test-question format, and you’ve got a recipe for poor performance for some students. According to a Concordia University story on standardized testing, “standardized tests feature multiple-choice or open-ended questions; some tests combine both. Because answers are scored by machine, multiple-choice tests generally have high reliability.” Concordia’s story continues, “Critics say multiple-choice tests are too simplistic, while advocates note that technology improvements feature items that demand more critical thinking before choosing a response. Open-ended questions allow students to display knowledge and apply critical thinking skills, but most require human readers.” Concordia’s story is important in that it shows that multiple-choice tests do not fully evaluate the way a student thinks. The better option – if one must use standardized testing – is to allow students to fully explain themselves through writing.

Other forms of standardized tests such as Maryland’s current graduation requirement test, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, have replaced “steady pace” teaching with rushed teaching. These multi-hour, high-stakes tests often take place at the start of the day and, after testing, students still have a full day of classes to attend. This long testing period and day adds to the problem that students may not perform to their full capability. Additionally, students no longer engage in the same high-level thinking they once did. A five-year University of Maryland study completed in 2007 found “… teachers were feeling pressure to teach to the test, leading to declines in teaching higher-order thinking… and in the actual amount of high content in the curriculum.” This does not add pressure only to students, but also to teachers. This then leads to work being crammed in at the end of each quarter, which leads to unnecessary stress.

Standardized testing does not fairly evaluate individual performance of a student’s overall growth over the course of the year. This does a disservice to both the teachers who worked hard to help their students grow and the students who worked extremely hard over the course of the year and improved tremendously but failed to score proficiently. Students’ work ethic during the year should measure more than a test score. Instead of considering whether students can graduate or not, depending on their scores on a particular day, we should look at the students’ overall GPA and take into consideration how hard they’ve worked during their high school years and let that be the deciding factor – as it once was – for graduation.