The Many Negatives of High-Stakes Standardized Tests

This week's article summary is The Psychological Toll of High-Stakes Testing.

I’m guessing that very few of us recall with glee taking standardized tests. I remember getting my first SAT results as a junior in high school: I had always felt I was fairly intelligent and while not Ivy League material I assumed most colleges would accept me. Getting those SATS scores was a shock to my ego. I literally worried if I would get into any college.

So, I prepped before I took the test a second time and raised my scores enough that I no longer felt stupid. Still, it really wasn’t until second semester of my freshman year in college that I began go regain confidence in my academic abilities.

Not surprisingly, the article below highlights the many negatives of standardized tests.

Topping the list is that they are a poor predictor of future academic performance because they don’t measure qualities like creativity, work ethic/effort, perseverance, and resilience.

The article points out some good aspects of standardized tests as well, especially that they provide a snapshot in time of where we stack up compared to others.

It’s dangerous, however, when scores are used to determine important decisions like college admissions or for our students middle school acceptance.

Partially due the pandemic and partially due to changing trends, many schools are beginning to re-assess the purpose and use of standardized tests. In many ways, what we have traditionally done at Trinity is what many schools are now using them for: one data point to help inform where a child is and needs to go. We don’t teach to the test yet we know from experience that our child-centered, differentiated pedagogy yields positive results (more a byproduct of) in traditional assessments, like standardized tests.

According to the article, it’s not standardized tests that are evil; it’s making them ‘high-stakes.’ It will be interesting to see to what extent colleges continue to de-emphasize standardized test results in their admissions process.

 Joe

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One problem with standardized tests: We don’t fully understand what they measure.

They are ideally designed to provide an objective appraisal of knowledge or perhaps even of inherent intelligence. 

But a recent study by Brian Galla, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, with Angela Duckworth and colleagues concluded that high school grades are actually more predictive of college graduation than standardized tests like the SAT or ACT. 

That’s because standardized tests have a major blind spot, the researchers asserted: The exams fail to capture the “soft skills” that reflect a student’s ability to develop good study habits, take academic risks, and persist through challenges. 

High school grades, on the other hand, appear to do a better job mapping the area where resilience and knowledge meet. Arguably, that’s the place where potential is translated into real achievement.

“The more I understand what testing is, actually, the more confused I am,” said Duckworth, a psychologist and expert on measuring human potential. “What does the score mean? Is it how smart somebody is, or is it something else? How much of it is their recent coaching? How much of it is genuine skill and knowledge?”

Yet standardized tests are still a mainstay of U.S. education. They play a critical role in deciding whether students graduate, what college or university they’ll attend, and, in many ways, what career paths will be open to them. Despite the fact that they take a few hours to complete—a tiny fraction of the time students spend demonstrating their learning—the tests are a notoriously high-stakes way to determine academic merit. 

By several measures, high-stakes tests are an inequitable gauge of aptitude and achievement. A 2016 analysis, for example, found that the tests were better indicators of prosperity than ability: “Scores from the SAT and ACT tests are good proxies for the amount of wealth students are born into,” the researchers concluded. 

Even students who manage to do well on the tests often pay a steep price emotionally and psychologically. “Students in countries that did the best on the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) often have lower well-being, as measured by students’ satisfaction with life and school,” wrote Yurou Wang, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Alabama. 

Test results are often tinged with a kind of existential dread. In an 2011 study, Laura-Lee Kearns, a professor of education at Xavier University, discovered that high school students who failed the state standardized literacy test “experienced shock at test failure,” asserting that they “felt degraded, humiliated, stressed, and shamed by the test results.” Many of the students were successful in school and thought of themselves as academically advanced, so the disconnect triggered an identity crisis that made them feel as though “they did not belong in courses they previously enjoyed, and even caused some of them to question their school class placement.”

“I enjoyed English, but my self-esteem really went down after the test,” a student reported, echoing a sentiment felt by many. “I really had to think over whether I was good at it or not.” 

High-stakes testing commonly begins in third grade, as young students get their first taste of fill-in-the-bubble scantrons. And while the tests are commonly used as diagnostic tools (presumably to help tailor a student’s academic support) and to evaluate the performance of teachers and schools, they can come with a bevy of unintended consequences.

“Teachers and parents report that high-stakes tests lead to higher levels of anxiety and lower levels of confidence on the part of elementary students,” researchers explained in a 2005 study. Some young students experience “anxiety, panic, irritability, frustration, boredom, crying, headaches, and loss of sleep” while taking high-stakes tests, they reported, before concluding that “high-stakes testing causes damage to children’s self-esteem, overall morale, and love of learning.”

Tests like the SAT and ACT aren’t inherently harmful, and students should learn how to manage reasonably stressful academic situations. In fact, banning them completely might be counterproductive, denying many students a critical avenue to demonstrate their academic skills. But to make them a condition of matriculation, and to factor them so prominently in internal ranking and admissions processes, inevitably excludes millions of promising students. 

Last year, the University of California dropped SAT and ACT scores from its admissions process, delivering a resounding blow to the power of two standardized tests that have long shaped American higher education. Meanwhile, hundreds of colleges and universities that dropped testing for pandemic-related reasons are reconsidering their value--including all eight Ivy League schools.

“This proves that test-optional is the new normal in college admissions,” said Bob Schaeffer, FairTest’s Public Education director. “Highly selective schools have shown that they can do fair and accurate admissions without test scores.”

In the end, it’s not the tests—it’s the almost fetishistic power we give to them. We can preserve the insights that the tests generate while returning sanity and proportionality to a broken system. Quite simply, if we deemphasize high-stakes tests, our students will, too.