The Literature Evaluation on the Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing

Moore Randy, author or cooperator of many academic journal articles, explains how standardized tests are unfair and discriminatory towards underprepared students who lower a school’s ranking by providing many realistic examples and scholarly sources. She argues that most colleges and universities do not help develop their students’ intelligence but instead identify the students’ smartness based on the standardized tests’ scores. In my opinion, this source is one of the best sources I have looked over because of the logical way she puts evidence and explanations in fit perfectly in the article.

Also, her article’s topic and information about standardized tests and their ineffectiveness or unfairness on the students’ success are related to my writing assignment’s topic. Therefore, this scholarly source has proven it is reliable and valid to use in my writing assignment. However, Moore Randy would have improved more on her writing if she doesn’t use too many examples/evidence in her article because they could confuse and distract the readers from the main idea of the writing.

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Moore’s conclusion is very clear; she wants the students to deserve the best teachers so they can gain great knowledge and once again believe they can succeed because they absolutely can.

The Washington Post, a famous newspaper that is popular as a Newsweek Interactive Company, reports about the weakening of SAT. The cause of the altering of the SAT is its poor prediction on college performance based on the SAT performance scores. The newspaper does not provide any specific statistics on how the SAT is viewed as practically useless.

However, the Washington Post does provide an explanation of why the SAT’s standards should be reset and redesign to approach more to student assessment. This piece of the academic source is not as helpful as the first source that I wrote about since the newspaper does not provide any research, study, or statistics on SAT’s poor performance. However, the Washington Post article’s vocabularies are simple and easy to comprehend, which helps the reader investigate more in the reading and gain more knowledge from it. Therefore, the newspaper does help me out on understanding that SAT is remodeled to link tighter to the content and skills students have gained from studying in the schools.

Hans Henrik Sievertsen, Francesca Gino, and Marco Piovesan figure out one factor that affects the children’s performance on standardized tests, which is time. They three use and provide the readers a test data of all attending Danish public schools’ kids from 2009 to 2013 to examine how time affects performance on standardized tests and how performance would be improved if time is scheduled correctly. Honestly, this scholarly source is useful in most ways since it is an experience with charts and data tables to support their thesis/claim. However, the research would have been more helpful if they expand on it and study more on students all over the world, not only in Denmark because my writing assignment focuses more on the United States’ test performance itself.

Atkinson, Richard C., and Saul Geiser talk about how high school grade point average (GPA) is a better prediction of college performance than SAT even though SAT could add a significance to the prediction. They also figure out that the SAT is more correlated with socioeconomic status, and therefore diminishes the chances to get into college for those students with lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They also mention some more about the biases in the ACT and SAT, which lowers the accurate predictions of these standardized tests. This article is the second-to-best academic source that I found relative and helpful for my topic because it explains how the ACT and SAT are significant but cannot measure the students’ aptitude for college admissions while GPA is varied but could be a better predictor. The article is divided into different parts so it’s easier for readers to skim through or read in-depth. However, the article could be more helpful if the authors can take more time to provide statistics and explain how the statistics prove the biases and not-that-much-useful in predicting the students’ ability. Lastly, the authors should also be more consistent in their argument, rather than staying in a neutral mood, with which one is better, either the GPA or the standardized testing.

Atkinson, Richard discusses aptitude versus achievement in this particular article. He claims that the SAT cannot measure the true intellectual abilities of a student though it offers a way to identify talented students, especially high-potential students in low-performing high schools. He is consistent with his opinion of not standing against standardized tests in general because they do help determine some of the academic intelligence of students. However, Atkinson thinks that everyone should be aware of the abused-use of standardized tests because students should be admitted to colleges based on other principles also, such as their actual achievements, their mastery in different subjects, etc. Atkinson’s point of view in this article does help out for my article in raising the awareness of standardized test’s use, especially the SAT and how it would negatively affect the students if the standardized test is misused. The article is very organized and straight-forward, it points out different perspectives of standardized tests, SAT, and explain what needs to improve and what needs to be removed or replaced. His conclusion is also persuasive, he knows that we cannot make the tests perfect but we can change and make them better for the students who take them.