Amidst the highly competitive influx of students that rose in response to demanding academic standards, a seemingly flawless standard has raised questions about necessity and student work ethic: standardized testing.
Students are highly familiar with exams such as unit tests, or, more infamously, the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA), and consider them routine events in the student experience.
Though the SBA may be the most well-known example, standardized testing includes standard curriculum testing with the common ‘no-retake’ agreement upon entering High School.
Valentina Orozco Pina, a student at THS, explains that “I understand how important testing is, giving teachers something to work off of for future curriculums to make their students successful, but it just causes an unnecessary amount of stress.”
Orozco Pina enunciates how students are still in a period of developing their critical thought, and are going through years of emotional turbulence while simultaneously being introduced to ‘the real world’.
But students aren’t the only ones affected by standardized testing.
An anonymous parent of a high school student at THS emphasizes how “testing is important for them [students] to become proficient in certain skills, but as parents, it worries us to see them so stressed over something that was routine for us when we were still in school.”
This parent, as an alternative to the stressful degree of tests, suggested that more hands-on learning and repetitive training to help students understand how things work rather than make them memorize for the sake of testing could be beneficial.
If this were not viable, providing more study material for students in terms of technique and curriculum if it were not condensed into one comprehensive set of textbooks would mitigate the stress of going “completely blind” into a test.
Both parents and students are affected by the stress that comes with standardized testing, subsequently affecting home life and day-to-day relationships when clouded by academic anxiety, projecting the large-scale effect on every-day life testing has on students.
