Celis 1

Ted Celis
Jim Nyenhuis
Writing 39C
1 June 2015
The Importance and Impotence of Testing
The issue of standardized testing is one of the most controversial subjects in the area of
education. Many have advocated for its continued use to measure the academic status of children
in America and to make important decisions based upon those scores while many more have
criticized its meager attempts and flawed philosophy. Both proponents and opponents of testing
are right in certain aspects of their viewpoints and wrong in others: testing should neither be
exterminated nor should it be allowed to continue existing as it currently does. It needs to be
tweaked. Testing should not be viewed as one simple entity but instead as a complex category of
assessments with a diverse range of purposes that extend from assistance to hindrance. The
problem with education today is the obscured or nonexistent understanding that policy-makers
have of this duality of tests, creating a dangerous imbalance in its implementation that negatively
affects children across the nation.
Testing as it is used today is not only high-stakes, but also highly inefficient. Before the
No Child Left Behind Act, testing was mainly used as a means of measuring the learning and
performance of students so that teachers and schools could know how to adjust to their needs,
but its implementation in 2002 has transformed testing into a shallow way to execute a harsh
system of accountability. This act has never truly aimed to help schools, just to punish those that
dont perform to the standards; in this aspect it has succeeded too well. The retrospectively
oxymoronic No Child Left Behind Act has boosted the rate of school closures across the nation,

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leaving hundreds of thousands of children displaced every year. One significant example of the
damaging effects of this ruthless system of accountability occurred in 2013 when the Chicago

Public Elementary and Secondary

Schools Closed by Year
2,300
2,100
1,900
1,700
1,500
1,300
1,100
900

(Snyder 200)
Public Schools district enacted the largest mass school closure in history, closing down 50 of the
public elementary schools deemed inadequateninety percent of which had a demographic
majority of African American students (Kunichoff). This demonstrates just how faulty test-based
accountability is, collecting an excessive amount of data that redundantly mirrors the already
well-known achievement gap and then punishing those low-performing schools instead of
providing them with resources to help level the scores. The main counterproductive philosophy
of standardized testing under the No Child Left Behind Act has been proven to be ineffective,
vainly attempting to encourage schools through its contrived competitive atmosphere but failing
by monetarily rewarding the wealthy and able schools while killing off the ones that need the
most assistance.
Standardized testing has also corrupted education by inducing an encumbering
atmosphere of fear within all levels of the school structure, affecting students, teachers, and
administrators. With such a strong emphasis on standardized testing, good test grades are widely

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and erroneously seen as the main goal of education. The high-stakes nature of these tests
encourage students to cheat, teachers to teach to the tests, and administrators to falsify data while
decreasing instructional time and narrowing curriculum through excessive focus on tests and test
preparation (Berliner). Instead of focusing on teaching students and cultivating a friendly
environment where students learn to enjoy learning, tests have constricted the range of subjects
and constructed a rote-learning environment in which skills are taught in a much more artificial
manner that discourages curiosity. While some may argue that this mechanical method of
learning actually results in an elevated level of education for students across the nation, the
supposed evidence of improvement is only an illusion of the nations heightened excellence.

(Dig Deeper into the Long-Term Trend Results)

Though children in elementary and middle schools may have experienced a gain in mathematics
and reading between the 1970s and the present daywhich could have been caused by a number
of factors besides testingthe academic advantage becomes nonexistent by the time the child

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reaches the end of high school. Standardized testing does an excellently thorough job at
deconstructing education and making ignoble sacrifices of educational substance for the
remarkable rewards of imaginary success, but there must exist a better way of utilizing them.
Before even beginning to propose a solution to all of the problems caused by
standardized testing, the concept of testing must first be adequately understood. It is not often
acknowledged, but within the realm of testing there are two quite distinctive classifications: the
summative assessments and the formative assessments. Summative assessments serve the

(Cross)
purpose of evaluating students overall performance after the learning process in order to make
decisions concerning students and all of the personnel who academically influence the student.
Nearly all standardized tests as they currently exist are forms of summative assessment, partially
because of its ties to accountability but also because some standardized tests are used to
substantiate course accreditation and supplement the admissions process. Formative testing, on
the other hand, serves the purpose of evaluating students abilities during the learning process in
order to help aid the students learning through helpful feedback. By doing this, the student is
encouraged to participate in a healthy amount of reviewing and the teacher can readily identify
the areas in which the student needs the most assistance. Standardized tests today are rarely

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formative, presumably because formative assessments require much more attention and
reflective analysis than the multiple-choice dependent exams can offer. Both summative and
formative assessments have their uses, but it seems with the imbalance of testing types that we
suffer today, few policymakers know the difference between the two. This has led to an extreme
overvaluation of summative tests and an undervaluation of the equally important formative tests.
Whenever there is a discussion concerning the problematic mass of standardized testing,
there is always mention of Finland and the educational prowess exhibited by their students. The
reason for this is because there exists only one single standardized test for students to take in
Finland yet the country consistently ranks as one of the best in the world in academics according
to the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The countrys sole standardized
test is called the Finnish Matriculation Examination and students are required to take it at the tail
end of their time in upper secondary school, being one of the primary components used in
determining a students admission to college ("The Finnish Matriculation Examination"). With
only one standard high-stakes test for students to worry about, Finnish teachers can avoid
wasting valuable instructional time on test preparation and teach under a curriculum as varied as
sufficiently feasible without worrying about the nonexistent test-based accountability. However,
its lack of standardized testing does not equate to a lack of testing; rather than serving as an
exemplary model for an examination-free academic society, it provides a powerful example of
how testing can be used to enhance education through more efficient use. While there is little
emphasis on large-scale tests, teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using
customized tests that they create themselves and random samplings of students are tested each
year by the Ministry of Education (Dunn). Though there are fewer standardized tests occurring
throughout Finland, the lack of summative assessment is counterbalanced by the proper use of

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formative assessment, thus putting more emphasis on learning at a personal level than as a
competitive national goal. In Finland, education seems to be viewed and treated as an individual
experience, consisting almost entirely of individualized formative assessments and a single
summative assessment that also focuses on separate student evaluations instead of collective
accountability measures.
Meanwhile, all of the other high-performing nations ranked through PISA are often
overlooked in the dispute over testing despite or because of the fact that they all rely heavily on
standardized tests. Several of the nations that have high rates of testing score even higher than
Finland based on the 2012 results of PISA. South Korea, for example, ranked fifth in its average
between its math, science, and reading scores while Finland ranked twelfth on the triennial

("PISA 2012 Results in Focus" 5)

survey. Before venturing too far into what seems like an inconsistent argument in support of high
volumes of standardized testing though, the South Korean educational culture must be
considered. The only similarities that South Korean schooling seems to share with Finnish
schooling is the high performance and high regard for teachers and education; they differ greatly
in all other aspects, with South Korean students dont even waste time on recess, spending much
more money and twice as much time in school or more depending on whether their families pay
for the almost compulsory private tutoring (Dalporto). This is all in preparation for the profuse

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amount of standardized tests they must take through their years in school, quantitatively heavy
on the side of accountability but, like Finland, qualitatively dense on the college-determining
final exam to be taken at the end of high school. While they perform well in a society that
utilizes tests more than any other country, they also receive an equally absurd amount of
preparation, which fares well for their test scores but at the cost of something much more
valuable. With the immense amount of emphasis placed on preparing for and scoring well on the
flood of standardized tests, a little more than half of South Korean students have suicidal

(Kang)
thoughts some time in their educational careers. It is no wonder why South Korea tops the world
ranks in educationthey retain a substantial population of high-performing students because a
good amount of the low-performing students simply do not survive. Half-serious dark comedy
aside, the fact that South Korea tests its students so much that it drives them to suicide makes it
far from the apex of educational standards, not that a prison-like educational life full of teaching
to the tests would make it so anyway.

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As shown through one of the only relations between the two countries of Finland and
South Korea, standardized tests would benefit a great amount if it focused more on the
admissions-related, student-central goal of summative assessment rather than on accountability.
With an increased emphasis on high school exit exams and college entrance exams, the two
nations put the student before policy. They rightly place less emphasis on the system of testbased accountability predominant in America in favor of a system of test-based admissions. As
explained previously, test-based accountability is highly flawed due to its redundant and
counterproductive nature, but it cannot be completely removed. Teachers in Finland maintain
great trust because of the qualifications needed for the title, but even here tests are used to assess
samples of students for reasons pertaining to accountability (Dunn), similar to how PISA uses
relatively small samples of country populations in its surveys (PISA 2012 Results in Focus).
By reducing testing to only segments of schools, the teaching to the tests syndrome would likely
be alleviated and more focus could be put into more effective data-driven measures of scholastic
ability, such as using graduation and dropout rates to evaluate schools. If such a change were
made to the summative side of standardized tests, accountability would become more effective
and the goal of education would return from getting high scores to actual learning and student
progression.
In addition to an alteration in the summative aspect of standardized testing, it would also
be nice to finally make standardized tests formative. Because standardized tests are designed for
ease of grading and not for complicated analysis, they are almost exclusively summative; so
while it would seem rather easy to implement a shift in the summative importance of
standardized tests from accountability to admissions, introducing formative standardized tests
could be a harder task to accomplish. It would hardly be fruitless, as research has shown that

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while studying for tests may result in low rates of retentionespecially when cramming
performing recall tests as a method of studying yields results even better than the acclaimed
methods of reviewing notes or concept mapping (Belluck). Formative assessments do work

(Why Spaced Review Works)

better when produced locally by teachers specifically for their students, but by adding a few
features to existing standardized tests, it is possible for formative assessments to exist in a
standardized format. One step test-makers should take in order for this to happen is to make their
tests more transparent, because many standardized tests do not reveal answers afterwards nor do
some tests even allow students to discuss the test questions among themselves. This makes tests
fairly useless in improving student understanding of concepts it covers. Additionally, test-makers
could add a factor of automated analysis to their tests by creating categories of topics and
perhaps subtopics that would give more feedback than a meager letter grade and show the
student or teacher what subjects need the most attention. Currently, one of the only tests that give
feedback is the SAT Reasoning Test, which provides students with an SAT Score Report that

Celis 10
attempts to be formative and barely succeeds in a vague manner. It reports the students score in
certain categories and in subcategories of questions deemed easy, medium, or difficult, which is

(Phu)
a diluted form of the more detailed formative tests it and other exams have the potential to be. By
allowing completed tests to be available for public viewing and by tacking on a simple system of
categorization on standardized tests, test-makers can transform the impractical tool of
accountability into a new, useful form of standardized formative assessment.
The modern form of standardized testing inflicts a great deal of damage to the population
of American students, teachers, administrators, and schools. Because of the improper and
imbalanced use of standardized testing in a purely summative format, favoring accountability
over student development, tests are not used in an efficient manner. Finland and South Korea act
as powerful examples of how tests can be made more useful, highlighting the rarely seen
formative assessment and showing that summative assessment is better used in admissions
instead of accountability. If the United States could adopt that kind of mentality toward
standardized tests, equitably trivializing accountability to shift students focus toward higher
education and providing students with rich feedback, the nation would certainly benefit.

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Works Cited
Belluck, Pam. "To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test." The New York Times. The
New York Times, 20 Jan. 2011. Web. 04 May 2015.
Berliner, David C., and Sharon L. Nichols. "High-Stakes Testing Has a Negative Impact on
Learning." Has No Child Left Behind Been Good for Education? Ed. Christina Fisanick.
Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2008. At Issue. Rpt. from "High-Stakes Testing Is Putting the
Nation at Risk." Education Week 12 Mar. 2007. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 5
May 2015.
Cross, Dana, and Mira Shennan. "Types of Evaluation." Plain English Program Evaluation.
Grosvenor, 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 1 June 2015.
Dalporto, Deva. "South Koreas School Success." Blogs. WeAreTeachers, 1 Apr. 2015. Web. 4
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"Dig Deeper into the Long-Term Trend Results." Top Stories in NAEP Long-Term Trend
Assessments 2012. U.S. Department of Education, 2013. Web. 25 May 2015.
Dunn, Jeff. "Why Do We Focus On Finland? A Must-Have Guidebook."Trends. Edudemic, 14
Aug. 2012. Web. 01 June 2015.
Kang, Yewon. "Poll Shows Half of Korean Teenagers Have Suicidal Thoughts." The Wall Street
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Kunichoff, Yana. "One Year After Closings, How Are Chicagos Public Schools Now?" In
These Times. In These Times and The Institute For Public Affairs, 5 June 2014. Web. 30
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Phu, Nielson. "Should You Retake the SAT?" The College Panda. The College Panda, 09 July
2013. Web. 01 June 2015.

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"PISA 2012 Results in Focus." OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2014. Web. 27 May 2015.
Snyder, Thomas D., and Sally A. Dillow. Digest of Education Statistics 2013. Washington, D.C.:
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May 2015. Web. 29 May 2015.
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n.d. Web. 02 June 2015.
Why Spaced Review Works. Digital image. LearnThatWord. LearnThat Foundation, 2005. Web.
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