Standardized testing is very common statewide for determining the students’ academic knowledge starting form K-12 grade. But what does these score tells us? Are they academically smart because they have high score? Or what if the student maintains good grades working hard in school but receive bad scores on these tests? There are many ambiguous answers to these questions. Standardized testing is bias based on minorities and financially separates the advantage student from higher-income families to score higher than lower income families. These testing also drive excellent teachers away from their profession. However, the question still remains: what does these results tell us how kids are learning?

There is a great improvement of students with their scores but there is still a big barrier between minority student such as Latinos and blacks with white students. According to a journal in Student Test Scores, a Wider Gap, African-Americans score increased to 6 points in the SAT verbal and 7 points higher in math in the past 10 years. In comparison, white student’s score jumped 11 points for verbal and 18 points higher in math during the same time interval. This statistic

Standardized testing seems like it is designed to reduce work to more on memorization. According to Shafer,(Tests that Fail Democracy (1), the goal for minority students is “not more writing and reading but more memorization.” Teachers are giving up their true profession just to prepare students for the big test. This brings more discouragement for the teachers but also the principle of the school. For example, if a student does badly on their test, the principal would lose his/her job and the teacher could have a pitiable evaluation and goes jobless. From the journal The Question is: Are Tests failing the Kids? a teacher finds the preparation very tedious and “taken the joy out of teaching” while they are “spending more time memorizing facts.” The tests have discouraged most qualified teachers away because they feel “the test are having adverse effects on instructional methods and working conditions.” Due to great pressure the teachers are encouraged to help students increase the score they don’t believe that it is their job to prepare the students to take the test but to increase the students eagerness of learning of what they are suppose to learn.

Standardized testing has singled out large numbers of minorities disabling them to have a future they needed. In California, Robert Atkinson the president of the University of California have declared that the top 4% students will automatically be accepted to any school in California and the school will look more into the students’ activities, grade point average and interviews if possible. Also in Texas’ universities, there’s going to be a new law that will disregard the students’ score from the SATs and more into the academ

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