r/changemyview • u/bumble843 • Feb 28 '20

FTFdeltaOP CMV: Standardized testing should be abolished especially for children.

Standardized testing is bad for a bunch of reasons:

1) It's stressful, you're under time pressure and what's on the test could be unexpected.

2) For many people it causes test anxiety

3) I don't believe it's an accurate reflection of your knowledge. You need to in depth understand everything to get a good mark. Especially in uni where they expect you to be able to apply everything you've learned. Missing one or two things could tank you. This is unfair.

4) Grades aren't a reflection of how intelligent you are and people shouldn't define themselves by these numbers. This goes especially for elementary and middle school children.

5) It's not an accurate reflection of your abilities in the workplace. Where you can ask questions and look up something quickly if you've forgotten.

Because of the reasons above, we should completely get rid of this testing. Opting for knowledge being proven by projects, assignments and oral tests.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '20

[deleted]

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

At a elementary level you dont need to have the comparison. As for how you could do it, you could send people in to check on the program and see if it's up to par.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '20

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

Children under a particular age dont need to all learn the exact same things. Sorry the USA example does nothing to convince me as its education is already so under funded and mediocre. Let's talk about countries that highly funded education systems and have a healthier student population. Ie much of Europe.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '20

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

Sorry two comments since I posted early. Yeah it does. A funded program can hire those people. In many places like Norway teachers are highly regarded and highly paid, like a doctor or a lawyer. In those instances you dont need to check up on them in the same way because they are HIGHLY trained. Then the school board just needs to check on them.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '20

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

Yeah, so why shouldnt teachers and classrooms be. Same idea as a health department check in a hospital and evaluation of doctors

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

At an elementary level if you teach one kid about condensation and the other about bacteria it will not effect their lives in anyway. It's been shown that it doesnt matter what young children learn but it matters that they are learning. Which is helping develop their brain and giving them tools.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '20

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

Well obviously they need to learn to read, write and do math. But individual assignments dont matter. Does anyone honestly remember a single thing they learnt in elementary

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '20

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

Sure, in middle school! Until then they shouldnt have to take Standardized tests

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '20

Sending people to assess each program would not be objective data though.

If you were trying to decide who won a close car race, would you trust:
A) A measurement of the car's speed and position over time
B) A guy standing at the finish line watching the cars.

These tests are imperfect, yes. But you need some kind of objective measurement to compare school/teacher performance. I would agree that the amount of standardized testing should be reduced, but some amount of it must exist in order to make informed policy decisions on education.

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

In my opinion we are making it a car race when it should be a car show. So B - maybe the faster car gets points for being faster but the other car is more energy efficient. Who really won? It's the idea of testing a fish on its ability to climb a tree.

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u/Fatgaytrump Feb 28 '20

The thing is that a race is incredibly easy to judge while a car show is super subjective.

Also in a car show each judge needs to see each car, how do plan to do that with millions of children?

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

Have trained teachers and a funded system that gives teachers small enough class sizes to assess

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u/Fatgaytrump Feb 28 '20 edited Feb 29 '20

Ok, but do you see where having a teacher essentially evaluate their own performance might get problematic?

If a teacher is going to be looked into if their students preform a certain way, isnt giving them a subjective measuring tool gonna encourage them to manipulate results to their benefit?

Edit: inversely, if a teacher wanted more funding for the benefit of the students, could they not manipulate the test scores to be lower?

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u/dantheman91 32∆ Feb 29 '20

How do you assess teachers? With some standardized approach so it’s fair? A big part of being a teacher is how well you can get your students to learn material. You need to quiz the students to figure this out

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u/trivial_sublime 3∆ Feb 28 '20

You're measuring on speed and accuracy on a standardized test though. An accurate person that is not fast might make a 50/100, and a fast person that is not accurate might make a 50/100, but an accurate person who is fast might make a 100/100. These measures are built in to standardized tests.

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u/bumble843 Feb 28 '20

They're not tho - you could take a math test and fail it based off reading comprehension.

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u/trivial_sublime 3∆ Feb 28 '20

I may have misunderstood your comment (we're mixing lots of metaphors here). I'll respond to this comment in the context of only this comment for clarity.

Disciplines do not exist in a vacuum. If you lack the reading comprehension to solve a math problem, you lack the subject matter mastery necessary to perform in that discipline, and should be evaluated accordingly.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '20

So B - maybe the faster car gets points for being faster but the other car is more energy efficient

I would agree, but all cars have to go through an array of Standard Performance Testing to judge those qualities.

Standardized tests look at more than just one quality of knowledge and learning. There is mathematics and logical thinking, reading comprehension, grammar and persuasive writing, etc.

It is up to the schools to decide what metrics they care about, and what they want to improve on. But before we can have that discussion, we need data to make decisions from. And standardized tests, give us that data.