Chatting with Abi
By Abigail Shlimenzon
By Abigail Shlimenzon
Every year juniors go through the same monotone process of standardized testing, whether it be the SBAC or SAT. And every year the same complaints are repeated by students, however they are never fully acknowledged. However this year, being the first year students are back in-person, these issues are magnified tenfold.
Although most of the standardized tests taken during junior year only take up one school day, these days add up and can push a lot of classes off track. Although this is a big issue even for regular classes, this taken up time has the biggest negative impact on AP courses. AP classes have to stick to a certain schedule to ensure that students have enough time to learn and review all the content that will be tested during the AP tests. The loss of even a few days can cause a lot of unnecessary stress for both students and teachers as they have to scramble to learn new material and not fall behind.
Another difficulty caused by these tests is that they cause additional stress to students who are already under a lot of pressure to do well academically from peers, parents and teachers. This additional stress hurts the mental health of many students and rather than focusing on school work, students’ attention is torn between different things.
Although the loss of time and additional stress are huge setbacks, arguably the most important issue with standardized testing is that it does not accurately measure a student’s knowledge. This has been proven time and time again by many different researchers and studies that show how test scores can be affected by factors such as stress, language barriers, test anxiety and even lack of motivation. These factors combined with an unequal amount of resources available to students make tests unfair and obsolete.
Although, in recent years, there has been an effort to remove standardized tests from the college admissions process, I believe that standardized tests should be completely removed from the educational system as they are not helpful to students or educators and only create obstacles.
Although most of the standardized tests taken during junior year only take up one school day, these days add up and can push a lot of classes off track. Although this is a big issue even for regular classes, this taken up time has the biggest negative impact on AP courses. AP classes have to stick to a certain schedule to ensure that students have enough time to learn and review all the content that will be tested during the AP tests. The loss of even a few days can cause a lot of unnecessary stress for both students and teachers as they have to scramble to learn new material and not fall behind.
Another difficulty caused by these tests is that they cause additional stress to students who are already under a lot of pressure to do well academically from peers, parents and teachers. This additional stress hurts the mental health of many students and rather than focusing on school work, students’ attention is torn between different things.
Although the loss of time and additional stress are huge setbacks, arguably the most important issue with standardized testing is that it does not accurately measure a student’s knowledge. This has been proven time and time again by many different researchers and studies that show how test scores can be affected by factors such as stress, language barriers, test anxiety and even lack of motivation. These factors combined with an unequal amount of resources available to students make tests unfair and obsolete.
Although, in recent years, there has been an effort to remove standardized tests from the college admissions process, I believe that standardized tests should be completely removed from the educational system as they are not helpful to students or educators and only create obstacles.