There are many debates about the education systems and their possible flaws and ways to improve them. One major critism regarding this topic is the fact that standardized tests can have more cons than pros. The prompt takes a negative stance and claims that these systems can hinder students, which I mostly agree with for the folowing two reasons. However, at the end, I do concede that there are still reasons not to eliminate these methods throughly, since they can be beneficial in some circumstances.
Firstly, standardized tests can be very restricted in terms of meassuring one’s true knowledge. For example, standard test usually heavily rely on an individual’s memory. Tests often answer questions that do not require any critical thinking and a high score can be easily achieved through mere memorization of the correct answers. This can harm students, since they are not expected to enhance their ability in thinking outside of the box and finding the answers themselves.
Moreover, standard exams mostly fail to take individual differences into consideration. For example, a math question in a standard exam is often required to be answered in one specific way, which is usually through the most recent topic that has been tought in the class. On the other hand, math is a very vast field and every student can come up with their unique way to response to a question and solve a problem, which is often discouraged in these systems. Standard exams are ususally designed for a large population and this means that students are all treated with one meassuring standard, which takes away the students’ creativity.
However, I do concede that standardization is important upto some extend. It can prevent too many differences and discriminations and can foster an opportunity to treat the students as fair as possible. For example, without the standart examination format, a school can give out much easier tests than another school and consequentlly, more students from the first school will be provided with an unfair advantage to enter better colleges.
In conclusion, standardized test can hamper students due to its indiscrimentory approach toward meassuring students’ abilities and even fail to do so because of its strict format and relies mostly on testing one’s memory. However, it can be beneficial in some areas by making sure that an exam is designed with the same difficulty level for a large population and can minimize the unavoidable unfairness we witness in education systems.