A huge part of a student’s school career is the test they have after their classes have ended. Should there be a test deciding whether you pass or not? Or is it too much pressure on the students and the teachers?

Students find out pretty early in the beginning of the year or semester that they will be tested in the classes they are taking. The test will decide if you pass or fail, or can bring down your grade significantly. The teachers are given a certain curriculum to teach and a certain amount of time to teach it in.

Those test scores can impact how much funding the government allows a school to have. In my opinion, that’s not fair. Some students don’t even try to do well on the test because they simply don’t care. What about the students that try their absolute hardest? They don’t deserve less funding because of careless students. In 2013, the American Educational Research Association found that those assessments often fail to capture the full spectrum of what students can do.

Standardized testing leads to ‘teachers teaching to the test.” This means they only teach what will be on the test. That can keep students from learning everything they need to from a class. If the teachers aren’t given a certain curriculum, there’s a possibility the teachers won’t teach something that is going to be on the test because they had no idea they were supposed to.
In my opinion, standardized testing has too many flaws. I think that teachers should make their own test for the students to take at the end of class. Teachers know their students and if they have the ability to go on to harder classes. Hopefully that will happen before I graduate.