By: Siri David

Standardized testing is a type of testing that happens throughout all school programs. It is a test that is set up where every student answers questions from the same pool. The goal is to see where students are at in their learning process and it helps create a benchmark to compare students and their average scores. This also helps show how successful teachers are with their lesson plans and learning process.

Standardized testing can have a lot of benefits. It helps lower the chances with bias because it has a more consistent scoring process. In the tests, if the questions are multiple choice or true or false this can lead to more accurate results for the education system.

Another pro to the testing process is that the results can help show teachers what certain areas the students need more time on. Along with that, it can help show if certain teachers need more professional development. Overall, standardized testing is one of the main things that helps maintain the education system.

Standardized testing does have downsides. The lead up to testing oftentimes causes a lot more stress for students than the average test. A very important con is that all students learn and process things in a different way, so everyone taking the same test can affect students who might struggle more to understand the material because of the layout.

Another downside is that most tests are around the core subjects, so more art and physical based classes don’t get as much attention which can then make it harder for those subjects to grow and change.

Normally large standardized tests happen once a year, like the MCA’s for example. Since these happen once a year if a student has a bad test taking day it can throw off their score for the whole year.

Overall, there are a lot of pros and cons for standardized testing. In the larger perspective there’s a lot of pros but closer up there are also a lot of flaws within the process. The pros tend to affect the education system well, the cons affect each student.