Psychological Testing - Term Paper Example

ent 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 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