Do standardized tests help or harm students?
And is the U.S. actually overtesting?
By now, we’ve all heard the refrain that one of the biggest issues with the current
state of education in the U.S. is overtesting.
And on top of sometimes dominating course curriculum, standardized tests can often provoke
anxiety, anger, and stress regardless of how they're used.
Even though standardized tests may seem as American as A. A Maple Leaf, B. Apple Pie,
C. Soccer, or D. All of the above, the question still remains: Do standardized tests do more
harm than good for students?
So sharpen your pencils and get ready for a whole lot of bad test jokes because we’re
about to dive pretty deep into the world of tests.
And to answer this big question, first we have to ask:
Exactly how many standardized tests are U.S. students taking each year?
A 2015 article from the Washington Post, drawing on data from the Council of Great City Schools,
reports that on average students from 66 major urban schools in the US take 112 mandated
standardized tests between Pre-K and 12th grade.
8th graders in that set tended to average the highest number of hours for mandated exams,
weighing in at 25.3 hours in the hot seat over the course of the school year.
And students as young as pre-k took approximately 4 standardized tests.
So even those little baby hands are hard at work choosing answers and filling in the blanks.
But keep in mind this doesn’t consider the number of hours educators need to prep students
for the tests which takes considerable time away from the mandated curriculum.
As a result the Department of Education issued action plans in 2015 and 2016 to reduce the
amount of standardized testing in order to focus more attention on the quality of the
tests and what exactly they were measuring.
They also suggested that the percentage of class time spent on standardized testing should
be capped at 2%.
Ok so we got a quick rundown on how many tests some students nationwide are taking every
year and it’s quite a lot.
But that brings us to our next question:
What are the origins of standardized testing in the U.S.?
And what was their purpose?
According to the National Education Association, testing in the U.S. started to change between
1840 and 1875.
That’s when schools began to shift their mission from educating primarily the wealthy
elites to educating bigger swaths of the population.
This shift was also marked by a gravitation towards written testing, instead of the old
standard of oral examinations.
But 19th century educators were starting to see if there were ways to measure student
performance for the purposes of college admissions and subject placement.
In 1890, Harvard’s President Charles William Eliot proposed a common entrance exams for
colleges, and in 1900, the College Entrance Examination Board (who you most likely know
as the folks who administer the SAT) was established, administering their first subject exams in
1901.
The U.S. army’s use of certain aptitude tests during WWI also helped to inspire the
spread of use of standardized tests in schools and in 1926 the first SAT was administered.
Then in 1935, the first high speed computers were used to process tests across the country,
which greatly reduced the cost of grading and administering them which meant that now
schools could administer more tests more often.
Since then there have been a variety of initiatives and government programs to oversee the
administration of tests nationwide.
So stressed students and school administrators today can trace the test craze back into the
19th century.
But although the data I cited earlier makes it obvious that American students take a lot
of tests, that doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad or harmful to students.
So, what if these tests work?
Or what if we’re testing students in the U.S. on average to other peer systems?
So to tackle this idea, it’s important to find some more data points and ask:
How does the U.S. compare internationally with countries that test at higher and lower
rates?
So in order to ask this question, I wanted to look at some information on how U.S. students,
as a whole, measure up internationally against others and then see what those countries’
policies on standardized testing are.
So since we started with numbers from 2015, I also checked out the Pew Research Center’s
published findings from the 2015 PISA (or Program for International Student Assessment)
exams.
The exam is administered every 3 years and measures: reading ability, math, and science
proficiency, in 15 year olds around the world, among other skills.
And those findings show that of the 72 countries that participated, the US ranked 40th in math,
25th in science and 24th in reading.
And in the 35 members of the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development the
US ranked 31st in math and 19th in science.
But before I make one too many jokes about a test acronym that brings to mind the leaning
tower of PISA, I started to look at nations that ranked higher than the U.S. with different
relationships to testing: The first would be the oft cited example of Finland, which
issues significantly fewer standardized tests than the U.S. and the other would be South
Korea, where students are tested at a more rigorous rate than students in the U.S. (at
least in terms of the difficulty of the exams and the significance placed on testing scores).
So let’s start with Finland.
In the same PISA scores from 2015, Finland ranked 5th in Science, 11th in Math, and 4th
in reading, with PISA marking all three of these scores as being significantly higher
than US students.
And this trend of being near the top of the pack has been relatively consistent for the
nation, at least going back to its 2010 PISA scores.
As I mentioned back in our episode on “why do we get grades in school?”
Finland has a significantly lower rate of standardized testing when compared with the
U.S.
So instead of the approximately 112 mandatory exams that students in urban schools were
taking between pre-k and 12th grade, the Finnish equivalent is 1 standardized test.
Yeah, you heard me right: one mandatory standardized test.
But before we start a rousing refrain of “One is the Loneliest Number” let’s see how
students and teachers in Finland respond to the lower testing rates.
Their 1 mandatory test isn’t taken until a student is rounding the corner at the end
of high school.
Instead, there’s a greater focus on teacher and student interactions, and improving the
classroom experience.
Also of note is that Finland largely does not have private schools and public schools
are funded relatively equally, unlike the U.S. where there are a plethora of high schools
and even elementary schools with price tags comparable to colleges and schools can have
vastly disparate budgets based on local taxes.
Although, on average Finland isn’t spending more per student than the U.S.
On the other hand, South Korea mirrors much of Finland’s success in student outcomes,
with a higher high school graduation rate and better college placement rates than the
U.S., with a whopping 70% of students enrolling in college.
And if you thought that kids in the U.S. who took oodles of SAT and ACT prep courses in
high school were being stretched to the limit, it doesn’t compare to their South Korean
peers, where some reports show that children are gearing up for their important college
entrance exams as early as elementary school.
Students are encouraged to take private lessons and extra classes to keep up in the highly
competitive college placement stakes, with some low income families spending up to 1/3
of their incomes on education expenses to help children place well.
The tests are mandatory to move on to college and extremely high pressure.
So even though the test is only 1 day, much of the focus of students’ schooling revolves
around preparing for the College Scholastic Aptitude Test, even as early as kindergarten.
And South Korean students are also scoring well, not only on their national exams, but
are outperforming their US peers on PISA.
In 2015, they ranked 10th in science, 6th in math and 7th in reading, all scores that
PEW marked as significantly better than the US.
But while some have praised South Korea and Finland’s outcomes, citing their stellar
scores, job placements, high high school graduation rates, and university enrollments, others
note that the size of the student population in these 2 countries are fairly small, with
more homogenous populations.
And the US on the other hand is spread across 50 states with differing economic circumstances
and greater diversity.
Also, even though South Korean students perform better than their US counterparts, there have
also been high suicide rates in students age 17-24, who don’t perform well in these tests
because they can determine so much of their future.
So how does it all add up?
So it seems that a lot of the question around whether standardized tests do more harm than
good center not only on the frequency of the testing, but also the importance placed
on the test themselves and how influential the results of a certain exam are on a student’s
future success in life.
In the US we test often, but critics note that the testing is sometimes scatter shot,
without a clear objective.
So rather than using tests to determine student progress, the myriad of mandated exams draw
students and teachers away from time spent on other lesson plans.
So over using standardized tests is a big issue, but so is forcing students to place
too much importance on a test in determining their future prospects.
What do you think?
Are standardized tests doing more harm than good?
And is there another model outside of the 3 here that you would propose for approaching
tests?
Drop them below, check out the works cited and we’ll see you next week.
Hey guys!
Or should I say “high heels for guys!” since I’m still sorting through your comments
and questions from last week’s episode on “when men wore high heels.”
Here’s what some of you had to say!
So some folks wanted to add a few touch points to our high heel timeline and I’m going
to detail them here:
Servant74 on Youtube and Mimi Wright on Facebook pointed out that heeled boots are still standard
footwear for a lot of horseback riders.
And since I’ve never done any serious horse riding (because pony rides at the county fair
probably don’t count) I’d like to thank them both for the update!
Adri Cortesia and Kendra Caruso asked if high heels were worn by butchers to help them avoid
the blood and guts on the floor.
So this is a really interesting question and I’m still trying to find an answer.
Because so far, all I can find is that this story is relatively popular on pinterest and
other self reported sites that claim that butchers (specifically in Ancient Egypt) wore
high heels for this purpose.
But I want to find some more definitive hard evidence on this before I weigh in, so stay
on your toes and I’ll follow up with what I find out next week!
Also thanks to Callum North, The Hard Problem, and Cuzican Aerospace who pointed out on Youtube
that there are 3 other instances of men’s fancy footwear which in order: Cuban heels, 1970s glam rockers
(like Gene Simmons) and Platform shoes worn in Ancient Greek Theatre.
Thanks a lot friends!
So, that’s it for now and we’ll see you next week!