Psychological Testing - Term Paper Example

In a recent commentary regarding President Obama’s speech in The New York Times, author Trip Gabriel briefly discussed the President’s remarks regarding the “high stakes” tests and the incited reaction from a couple of bloggers. The President remarks on how much focus is given to these tests at the expense of the curriculum. According to the article, President Obama said, “Too often, what we’ve been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools.

” A blogger for Education Week remarked that the President is going against his own government’s policies on standardized tests that involve having students go through several tests in a school year. However, the Department of Education maintains its stand on the expansion of testing. They claim that these are actually means to ease the pressure on teachers, because instead of year-end tests that normally put the blame on schools if the results are bad, students will be tested for their own progress more than once a year (Gabriel, “Bloggers Challenge President”).

The issue here is not merely the number of tests a student has to go through, but the test itself. However, increasing the number of tests in a year increases the issues in these tests as well. Even author Alfie Kohn in his book “The Case against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools” explains his opposition to standardized testing. The issues STANDARDIZED TESTS 3 surrounding the tests are abound, yet articles that give adequate information on the tests are lacking.

Most of the publicly available articles offer generic information on the tests, but do not really describe the content. Sometimes, the content of the test might surprise the students and their parents (Harlen, 2002, p.141). For example, in another article from The New York Times last March 16 by Jacques Steinberg entitled “For SAT Test-Takers, Is ‘The Situation’ the Right Answer?,” the peculiarity of a test question is discussed. The essay prompt asked the students to provide opinions regarding reality television.

The executive director of the SAT test declared that the question is about pop culture and it was just a fair question to ask. People may have differing opinions on this matter. However, it sort of emphasizes the point that the scope of the exam is not widely discussed publicly, since topics such as this causes surprise from parents of test-takers (Steinberg, “For SAT Test-Takers”). Still, the presence or absence of the information is not the main topic of this paper. The issue on how necessary these tests are is the area that needs more attention.

First, even though newspapers frequently quote the scores of the tests, and several experts believe that this is the best measurement for an individual’s progress, it is not the absolute standard for success (Ryan and Weinstein, 2009, p.224). Students have endured more and more tests over time, yet discussion on new educational processes are not happening. The tests only force the institutions to push their students to earn higher grades, but they do not result in providing solutions to the real problems that causes low marks (Harlen, 2002, p.141). Second, Indian University Professor of Education Roger Farr states that “multiple-choice questions do not allow students to apply what they can do.”