Standardized testing.
That’s been the name of the game for public education ever since I was in school. In Alabama, we had to take the Stanford Achievement Test at least once a year every year from third grade to 10th grade. If it wasn’t the Stanford Achievement Test, we had our Alabama Basic Competency Test (we always called it the BCT).
Then in our junior and senior years, we had to take the graduation exam, an exam we had to pass to graduate high school and receive our diploma.
And of course to get into college, you had to take either the ACT or the SAT.
Yep, we had to learn how to fill out our names using a Scantron form, and we were reminded by the directions to always fill in the bubble completely to make sure it doesn’t count it incorrectly.
It seems like when our teacher was mandated to read the directions, I almost could recite them, and probably could still today.
It was a time of year I kinda liked and hated at the same time. I liked it because I knew that we weren’t doing any class for the whole week. So it was kinda like a respite from the rest of the schedule. But I didn’t like it because we had to stay in our seats at school for about three hours with little or no movement. There was no sound in the class.
And when the results came back, we always wanted to see where we were in the percentile. Certain subjects were always lower for me while others were higher.
But I have to admit, if I was a third grader and passing or failing the third grade was based on the Stanford Achievement Test, I might have really worried about the test. I might have even performed poorer.
It’s one thing to use them as an assessment of where students are. It’s another to see if you pass or fail based on the results of the test. Especially when this is the first test like this many of these kids have ever taken in their lives. That’s a lot of pressure to put on these kids.
I do worry that we’re so worried about teaching the test that we aren’t really seeing if the students are learning.
Sure, I think it’s great to have tests, and you need them. But I think it’s too much to ask a third grader.
Brent can be reached at bmaze@newtoncountyappeal.com.
