Standardized Testing

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Standardized Testing: Are they Beneficial?

Standardized testing is very common statewide for determining the students’ academic knowledge starting form K-12 grade. But what does these score tells us? Are they academically smart because they have high score? Or what if the student maintains good grades working hard in school but receive bad scores on these tests? There are many ambiguous answers to these questions. Standardized testing is bias based on minorities and financially separates the advantage student from higher-income families to score higher than lower income families. These testing also drive excellent teachers away from their profession. However, the question still remains: what does these results tell us how kids are learning?
There is a great improvement of students with their scores but there is still a big barrier between minority student such as Latinos and blacks with white students. According to a journal in Student Test Scores, a Wider Gap, African-Americans score increased to 6 points in the SAT verbal and 7 points higher in math in the past 10 years. In comparison, white student’s score jumped 11 points for verbal and 18 points higher in math during the same time interval. This statistic shows that white high school seniors score much higher than any ethnic group than they did decades ago. This shows a large gap between the minorities. Part of the reason is due to cultural and language barrier that these students face. Referring to the journal Tests that Fail Democracy, minority students tend not to do as well “because they aren’t given the time they need to process information, write essays, and unravel foreign culture they are being asked to identify.” These conflicts lead the students to be discouraged to take these tests that lead a big rate of dropout for minorities. Texas has the rising “dropout rates especially among black and Hispanic students.” (Texas Law Limits Use of S...