If you want to go to medical school you take the MCAT. If you want to go to law school, you take the LSAT. When students apply to college, they usually take the ACT or the SAT (although some colleges are nowĭropping this requirement in the interest of making admissions more equitable). states require a kindergarten readiness test. Likewise, standardized tests are extremely useful for educators and their institutions to gauge progress and meet the needs of students. When you apply for citizenship, you take a standardized test to see if you understand the basics of American governance. When you take a baby to a doctor, they assess the baby’s health by using a “standardized” checklist: How does the baby’s weight compare with others the same age and are they meeting developmental milestones? When you apply for a driver’s license, your state motor vehicle bureau requires you to take a standardized test to see if you When you think about it, standardized tests are part of our lives and have beenįor a long time. Why do students have to take so many tests? Standardized test and interpreting the results requires a lot of different expertise in curriculum, child development, cultural and linguistic differences, statistics and a field of study called psychometrics. Questions on these tests tend to be multiple choice or true-false because that raises the chances that results are fair and objective, with less possibility for bias or favoritism in scoring the answers. This allows people who look at the results to make comparisons among groups of students. But what exactly are standardized tests, what are they used for, and why are there so many of them?Ī test is standardized when all the students taking the test have to respond to the same set of carefully selected questions. What is the main purpose if a teacher uses a standardized test _?įew education topics get parents, teachers, and school leaders more riled up than discussions about using results from student tests to measure the quality of state education systems, districts, schools, and sometimes even teachers.What makes a standardized test standard?.Why do we need both standardized and non standardized measures of assessment?.

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