As high-school students prepare for college, they are keenly aware of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a standardized exam that carries great weight with college admissions committees. Most state education departments strongly rely on reading, writing, and math scores on standardized competency or achievement tests to evaluate their elementary and secondary schools. State officials make concerted efforts to get their schools to improve their scores. To help schools prepare pupils for the HSPT, the state specifies the achievement-test scores that mark satisfactory progress for third and sixth graders. It might seem so.
Testing seems to hold schools accountable and to stimulate educational improvement.
But a number of educators have expressed deep reservations. Standardized tests assess only limited kinds of thinking. Because they are timed and follow a multiple choice format, they reward the quick detection of right answers, but they discourage deep thought. Standardized tests also discourage students from looking at problems from different perspectives. Teachers frequently report that their most imaginative and thoughtful students bristle at the assumption that there is a single right answer and think about ways in which supposedly wrong answers might be true.