Why attack standardized testing
... Why not establish a fair test for all and allow the best man or woman to win? ... Standardized tests were once heralded as the bearers of meritocracy: By setting performance standards, these tests are meant to not only be efficient but to also provide a fair, scientific, and objective assessment of the person being tested. ... Does the practice of standardized testing disadvantage minorities and the poor? More and more so, research indicates this is true: By relying on standardized measurement and management criteria of what it means to do good, we are downplaying personal experience, creating cultural bias, and ignoring differences in learning; often to the disadvantage of the less privileged and minority students. ... The notion of “the one best way to do the job” would spread quickly and by the latter part of the twentieth century, scientific management had taken over the American school system with the best example today being high-stakes standardized testing such as minimal competency exams and the college admissions exams. In 1926, Carl Brigham would develop what is now the SAT, drawing from his observations of standardized tests on military draftees in World War I. (2) Brigham, the founder of the test that thousands will rely on to decide their fate come freshman admissions, did not reject to note his ‘scientific’ studies of race and intelligence performance on standardized tests: “…We are incorporating the savage into our racial stock…. ... The formula for making the IQ Garza 3 test account for the variance in scores between men and women was simple: Researchers continued to use the same questions, seeking unbiased outcomes, yet they eliminated the imbalance between the number of questions women did poorly on and the number men did poorly on, Only no one ever sought to lessen the gap between races on standardized test performance, and even today minorities who get into higher education do so despite tests, not because of them. ... Why the gap? To understand the variability between races, it is first vital to understand why we use the SAT. ... On Ellis Island, Carl Brigham’s forerunner Henry Goddard, an immigration official, established standardized intelligence tests for entering immigrants and established that 79% of Italians were “feebleminded”. ... For instance, one impact of standardized testing on minority students cited by a growing number of researchers is its role in the denial of opportunities to minorities (e. ... On occasion, student and administrative wants converge—yet in the case of standardized test score admission decisions, students lose. ... As some of these observers claim, because standardized tests reflect the majority culture, minority student performance on them may not yield a fair representation of what these students can do, given their ‘minority’ status and cultural differences. ... Sociolinguistic competence and socially imbedded communication can obviously affect students’ answers on standardized tests, yet we continue to allow this discrepancy.