Standardized Testing : is It Ruining Your Childs Education?

Standardized testing is testing that scales schools and individuals against each other. In Australia, such tests are NAP LAN, QSC, HSC, VSC and ICAS. I’m sure there are tests around the world which are of similar purpose. All you need to know is what standardized testing is.

This article is all my opinion, but you may draw some facts from it.

Standardized testing, whilst it may be a good indication of you well you’re child is performing against others in the same state, does however have very little benefits. Let me explain. A standardized test is a test whereby students can be ranked on a league table because they did the same test. This has lead to 3 significant effects.

1. Media

The media has now taken this data obtained from such tests and manipulated them. I’m not saying what they’re saying is wrong, it is just the way they put them. In society is it now “My school is better than yours” and “My school is higher ranked than yours”. Is this really a good measure of how well your individual student is performing? Does this mean that your child will fail in society because they are not attending the “best” school? The media suggest this, however there is much more to a school than simply a number on a table. So the exposure of this data has made the education industry an arena where schools pit numbers against each other. Of course they want more publicity so they disregard the lower scores. Is this a real indication of how good a school is?

2. Education

Schools are now not educating your children on how to succeed in life and the wider community but how to tackle an exam. They’re teaching your kids what to look for in a question and how to answer it sufficiently to gain the most possibe marks. Essentially they are teaching exam tactics. So knowledge is not so much prevalent anymore. So do you want your child to be the best at taking an exam, but have no real life societal skills? If this continues your child will not be able to translate to the real world. They will be so proficient at taking an exam that when they hit the workforce or the like, solving a real life problem will be a first for them. So your child will not know how to perform a simple task such as applying a concept to a situation. Educators are only worried about the schools numbers, they don’t care about your child’s future. The lesson now has little content learning, but content tackling technique. Things such as reading around words and inferring from a question. How does this translate into the real world? It just doesn’t.