Nicole Kim
Amanda Clark
Josh Ju
Justin Blackwood
Quynh-An Le
Introduction: Education is the key to success and school allows us to obtain a high education to lead us far, but there have been controversy whether standardized test is helpful or harmful and should the US replace it with the college exam like other nations. The teachers, parents and students expresses their opinion toward this topic, but the government are still struggling to make the final decision to keep the original exam or replace it a higher and more challenging exam?
Question: Should the U.S school system adopt (more rigorous curriculums such as) a challenge College Entrance Exam like other nations such as Japan, Korea, England, China, etc instead of having standardized tests?
Source A
The Rise of the Testing Culture
As Exam-Takers Get Younger, Some Say Value Is Overblown
By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 10, 2006; A09
Test preparation for children barely out of diapers is hardly something Lee learned while getting her education degree at the University of Maryland, she said. But it is what she says she must do — for the kids’ sake — based on her past experience teaching in a Prince George’s County elementary school.
“The child who can sit and answer the questions correctly is identified as talented,” Lee said. “It hurts me to have to do this, but it hurts the kids if I don’t.”
Lee’s approach underscores the culture of testing that reigns in the United States. Americans like tests so much that they have structured society around them.
“We are pretty much preparing [kids] for the SAT at the age of 6,” added Solorzano, who also worked at the Educational Testing Service, the world’s largest private educational testing and measurement organization.
Americans embrace tests because they are entranced with objectivity — or at least the appearance of it, experts say.
“Merely having a number associated with something makes it sound worthwhile, even if the number isn’t all that valid,” said Robert J. Sternberg, dean of Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences and former president of the American Psychological Association.
Although U.S. students have never been strangers to tests, President Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative has revolutionized the process. Implemented in 2003, the law seeks to hold schools accountable for results. It not only added a national mandate for testing, but also raised the stakes higher than ever. A single test today can determine grade promotion or high school graduation, a teacher’s salary or a principal’s job.
Proponents say standardized tests are the best objective tool to hold teachers and schools accountable; opponents argue that the tests prove nothing more than that some kids are better at taking tests than others.
The testing culture “has a lot more momentum than it should,” agreed Harvard University education professor Daniel Koretz, an expert on assessment and measurement. He said a lack of solid research on the results of the new testing regimen — or those that predated No Child Left Behind — essentially means that the country is experimenting with its young people.
Tests, experts say, also serve as self-fulfilling prophecies; the most elite schools accept only students with top scores and then brag that it is these students who do well. The current craze of ranking schools also perpetuates the importance of tests, they say.
“I’m so sick of caring about those tests,” she said.
“I think we have probably, as a culture and as a society, gone too far,” said Michael A. Morehead, associate dean of the College of Education at New Mexico State University. “We need to really reflect on what these tests imply. They don’t really evaluate character. They don’t really evaluate persistence of an individual.”
Standardized tests also don’t measure values or attitude, said Daniel Chambliss, a sociology professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.
Source B
An answer to standardized tests
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Sara Monempour was 2 when her family moved from Tehran to L.A. Then she did what most new Americans do: learned English.
Sara Monempour is studying to become part of an elite group responsible for vetting standardized tests taken by students each year.
By Bob Riha Jr., USA TODAY
Attending Los Angeles County public schools, Monempour excelled in class but scored “unbelievably low” on standardized reading tests, up to and including the SAT.
Then she noticed most of her bilingual classmates did poorly, too. “We were raised here … and yet this pattern was always a factor,” says Monempour, who spoke Farsi at home. “People who speak a different language at home or with their friends and family would have issues with testing.”
Now 23 and a doctoral student at the University of California-Los Angeles, she hopes to become part of a small but growing group of elite researchers, known as psychometricians, who do little else but think about standardized tests.
Once considered an afterthought, standardized testing now drives education’s most important decisions: whether students graduate, whether schools “need improvement” and even whether teachers keep their jobs.
No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s education reform law, more than doubled the number of standardized tests schools must give each year, and it very likely will double it again in coming years.
Importance of tests
Most test questions are field-tested with kids — the SATs, for instance, include a handful of questions that won’t affect students’ scores but are simply being tried out for future tests.
Even the simplest math or reading problem may be the result of months of research to determine if it’s clear, fair and difficult enough — but not too difficult.
“Errors aren’t new,” Hill says. “What is new is that the stakes are so high.”
Occasionally, things go haywire on the real test, with real consequences: Thousands of students in Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota and other states have been wrongly told they failed high school graduation exams or other key tests; some have sued.
Such problems don’t affect just students. At least 20 lawsuits have been filed this year after more than 4,100 teaching candidates were incorrectly told they had failed ETS’ nationally administered Praxis teacher preparation exam.
It’s worth pointing out that even psychometricians say such tests shouldn’t be the sole criterion determining whether teachers can teach, whether schools pass muster, students graduate or colleges accept them.
“Test scores are limited in what they tell you about a person, and test users don’t always keep that in mind,” Walker says.
For her part, Monempour, who’s at UCLA with the help of a fellowship from testing company Harcourt, says she’s surprised by how important testing has become.
“I really never thought it was going to get this huge,” she says.
Studying the effects of testing on English-language learners, she says, is an issue that must be addressed.
“If we need to measure students’ achievement and capabilities, we need to do it right.”
Source C
This January, a record 377,400 students took the first round of tests; another occurred last month. But despite hard study and equally hard prayer at popular Shinto shrines, two-thirds of them were doomed to fail. While the winners got to breathe easy for the next four years - Japanese colleges are not noted for taxing their students -many of the losers will try again next year.
”Examination hell” is a well-known, much-condemned phenomenon. Critics charge that the system emphasizes rote memorization and stifles creative thinking. Japanese children, they say, emerge as worker bees with stunted personalities.
Every year some students crack under the strain. In February, a 23-year-old man who had tried six times to get into Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University hanged himself after having looked at the wrong list and concluded that he had failed again. His body was found just after the telegram arrived informing him that he had passed.
Pressure to get into the ”right” colleges is so intense that an increasing number of parents enroll their children in private preparatory schools that ride a steady track to the top. So many of the brighter youngsters are in private schools now that public-school students find themselves virtually locked out of the more prestigious colleges. But instead of easing anxieties for many youngsters, the tough competition for prep schools has simply advanced the process by six years.
Source D
What’s Wrong With Standardized Tests?
Are standardized tests fair and helpful evaluation tools?
Not really. Standardized tests are tests on which all students answer the same questions, usually in multiple-choice format, and each question has only one correct answer. They reward the ability to quickly answer superficial questions that do not require real thought. They do not measure the ability to think or create in any field. Their use encourages a narrowed curriculum, outdated methods of instruction, and harmful practices such as retention in grade and tracking. They also assume all test-takers have been exposed to a white, middle-class background. (See “How Standardized Testing Damages Education,” a FairTest fact sheet.)
Are test scores “reliable”?
A test is completely reliable if you would get exactly the same results the second time you administered it. All existing tests have “measurement error.” This means an individual’s score may vary from day to day due to testing conditions or the test-taker’s mental or emotional state. As a result, many individual’s scores are frequently wrong. Test scores of young children and scores on sub-sections of tests are much less reliable than test scores on adults or whole tests.
Do test scores reflect real differences among people?
Not necessarily. To construct a norm-referenced test (a test on which half the test-takers score above average, the other half below), test makers must make small differences among people appear large. Because item content differs from one test to another, even tests that claim to measure the same thing often produce very different results. Because of measurement error, two people with very different scores on one test administration might get the same scores on a second administration. On the SAT, for example, the test-makers admit that two students’ scores must differ by at least 144 points (out of 1600) before they are willing to say the students’ measured abilities really differ.
Don’t test-makers remove bias from tests?
Most test-makers review items for obvious biases, such as offensive words. But this is inadequate, since many forms of bias are not superficial. Some test-makers also use statistical bias-reduction techniques. However, these techniques cannot detect underlying bias in the test’s form or content. As a result, biased cultural assumptions built into the test as a whole are not exposed or removed by test-makers.
Source E
Usually created by commercial test publishers, standardized tests are designed to give a common measure of students’ performance. Because large numbers of students throughout the country take the same test, they give educators a common yardstick or “standard” of measure. Educators use these standardized tests to tell how well school programs are succeeding or to give themselves a picture of the skills and abilities of today’s students.
Standardized tests can help teachers and administrators make decisions regarding the instructional program. They help schools measure how students in a given class, school, or school system perform in relation to other students who take the same test. Using the results from these tests, teachers and administrators can evaluate the school system, a school program, or a particular student.
Back to the Table of Contents
How Do Schools Use Standardized Tests?
Different types of standardized tests have different purposes. Standardized achievement tests measure how much students have already learned about a school subject. The results from these tests can help teachers develop programs that suit students’ achievement levels in each subject area, such as reading, math, language skills, spelling, or science.
Standardized aptitude tests measure students’ abilities to learn in school–how well they are likely to do in future school work. Instead of measuring knowledge of subjects taught in school, these tests measure a broad range of abilities or skills that are considered important to success in school. They can measure verbal ability, mechanical ability, creativity, clerical ability, or abstract reasoning. The results from aptitude tests help teachers to plan instruction that is appropriate for the students’ levels.
Standardized tests have limitations. These tests are not perfect measures of what individual students can or cannot do or of everything students learn. Also, your child’s scores on a particular test may vary from day to day, depending on whether your child guesses, receives clear directions, follows the directions carefully, takes the test seriously, and is comfortable in taking the test.
Source F
Chinese students fight for college places
By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing
More than 10 million Chinese students face one of the toughest tests of their young lives in the national college entrance exams over the next few days.
With about twice as many entrants as college places, competition is fierce and students have employed a range of methods to make sure they succeed.
They have joined cramming schools, hired home tutors and attended relaxation classes to make sure they are not too tense on the big day.
I think I have failed my father… I’m not good enough
Shi Meng
Some have gone to even greater lengths to ensure exam success.
A newspaper in Tianjin, a city in northern China, reported local girls have been buying contraceptive pills to delay their periods.
They fear a period during the exams could affect their concentration and so lead to lower grades.
Parents are also getting in on the act. Some have booked their “little emperors” into hotels near exam centres to ensure they arrive on time for the tests.
The rest of society is also doing its bit to make sure students are not disturbed while taking their exams.
Police will not use their car sirens, and construction sites will be shut down between 2200 and 0600 to ensure the youngsters get a good night’s sleep.
Still, the pressure on Chinese students is great, with at least one teenager reported to have committed suicide.
Anything that is not focused on academic achievement is often frowned upon by parents
Exam entrants, such as 18-year-old Shi Meng who attends Beijing’s Hangtian High School, are being pushed by their parents to do as well as they can.
“There’s been a lot of tension in the family. There are always arguments, with my parents fighting about me a lot,” said Miss Shi.
“I’m always the centre of everything they do and I get angry sometimes because of the pressure.”
High expectations are often difficult to live up to, as Miss Shi explained.
“Actually, I think I have failed my father. He hoped that I could go to a good university, and was even prepared to pay a lot of money for me to go, but I’m not good enough,” she said.
Cramming
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