Tests are used to determine a student's academic level. They become the basis for early tracking and then ongoing tracking. In recent years, test results have been increasingly used to determine whether a child should advance from one grade to another. If tests play a significant role in grade advancement or are the primary basis for a school's so-called accountability, teachers feel compelled to spend considerable time preparing children to take the tests. In such cases, the tests become the school curriculum.
Preparation usually begins many weeks before actual testing.
During this period, two to three hours a day are often devoted to practicing tests and related exercises, all alien to the ongoing instruction and the usual student response patterns. Teachers readily acknowledge that questions in the practice exercises, which are similar to those on the real test, are trivial. Moreover, the possible responses contain words that children likely have never seen and certainly don't use. By the time the three days of real testing are over, weeks, sometimes months, have passed. Time for real books has been sacrificed for time spent reading isolated paragraphs and answering multiple-choice questions.