The Problem with Standardized Tests

In 2019, during my junior year of high school, I took the Advanced Placement (AP) English Language and Composition exam. One of the questions was to write about something that you consider to be “overrated” and explain your argument. Although they suggested 40 minutes to answer this prompt, I had spent too much time on the first two essays, and only had about 15 minutes left to answer this question, so naturally I chose the first thing that came to mind when I thought of overrated, which was the test I was currently taking. At that moment I literally could not come up with anything else and so I literally wrote on a standardized test that I thought it was overrated, but I stand by that answer to this day.

Proponents argue that standardized tests offer an objective measurement of education and a good metric to gauge areas for improvement, as well as offer meaningful data to help students in marginalized groups, and that the scores are good indicators of college and job success.

However I disagree with all of these points. Firstly, researchers at UChicago found that ACT scores are not good for gauging students’ readiness for college '' after studying 55,084 students who took the ACT in the spring of 11th grade and then went straight to a four year university. Instead they concluded that GPAs are “stronger indicators of college readiness because they measure a wider variety of skills” while “standardized tests measure a smaller set of skills, and students can prepare for these tests in narrow ways that may not translate into better preparation to succeed in college.”

Secondly, many seem to think that standardized test data can show what areas need improvement in the marginalized students who take them through the results, and that’s helpful because then schools can use that information to better provide education to students. However this argument fails to acknowledge that standardized tests don’t measure creativity and don’t offer meaningful measures of progress and feedback that could contribute to a child’s education, just the raw test scores. Also, schools with higher average scores are usually given more funding when according to this logic, schools with lower scores should get more in order to receive the ‘necessary help’ to improve scores. Furthermore, standardized tests were initially created and used by eugenicists who designed aptitude tests to prove their claims of white supremacy. While clearly racist tests are no longer in practice, the SAT, for example, is still an aptitude test but is seen as a valid measure of intelligence, even though disproving eugenics should have proven that aptitude tests are BS. Rather, they are still in use because they benefit white people, who have historically been the demographic that scores the highest, until 2015. Therefore standardized tests actually hurt the marginalized communities that some claim they benefit.

Finally, standardized tests do not provide the objectivity that they claim to, which is the base justification for them. I remember writing on my AP exam, that a kid who commutes two hours by bus and cannot afford a high quality breakfast has a disadvantage being compared to a kid that lives a 15 minute drive from the testing center and whose family provides a big breakfast that morning. Similarly, a kid who takes the SAT while at the same time their parent has a chemotherapy appointment has a disadvantage that kids with healthy immediate family members do not face. These examples might seem arbitrary, and I don’t have data or studies that prove how common these situations are, but they are situations that certainly affect small groups of standardized test takers. And, many more situations that are similar can be easily brainstormed. The point of these examples is to poke a hole in the claim that standardized tests are objective purely because everyone takes the exam during the exact same circumstances. People's experience leading up to the exam, both throughout their whole life and in the hours before, are not measures of how smart one is, but do affect performance on these tests. Similarly, a kid that can only take the test once might feel much more pressure than someone who can afford a tutor and multiple retakes. Standardized tests claim that everyone has an even playing field but it is clear that socioeconomic status, personal background, and immediate circumstances can all affect performance, which disproves that claim. Therefore, standardized tests are overrated because they present a false pretense of objectivity, they don’t benefit marginalized communities, and they are not the strongest indicator of college success. For these reasons, they should not be held with as much value as academia places on them today moving forward.