#stadardized testing

Well hello again my lovely follower count of zero. Good to talk to you all once more. I’m back to share my opinions on the education system that I am witnessing as a high school student, because, as always, I have some opinions. 

The other day, I was required to take a survey about my school and its effectiveness in teaching me the “lessons I will use for the rest of my life” and the like. I live in Maryland, so I will not presume to be an expert on the national education system in the US, but I certainly have some issues with the way things are run in my school district. After promising to cut down on testing in our county, the Montgomery County Board of Education eliminated semester and final exams for this year. Which are already the tests that actually do measure what we have learned in our classes. But they didn’t truly cut out these tests, because we now have major tests every quarter instead of every semester. So we see an increase in how many tests we need to take and prepare for, even if the tests are a little less dense in material. But, after implementing these required quarterly assessments (RQAs) this year, I’ve seen an increase among my teachers in the amount of teaching to the test. We are constantly preparing for these big tests, when the focus should really be on learning the material because you want to, or because it’s important to our futures. But instead, we focus on doing practices for these tests so that we can be prepared to make our schools look good. It’s the same with the big standardized tests, like the PARCC test which was implemented in Maryland several years ago. Schools care so much about students passing standardized tests that they often fail to catch student’s interest in subjects, because students only see how the material will benefit them come testing day, not how the material might be useful all throughout life.