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Just a thought.....we hear all the time about how we are falling behind other industrialized nations in areas of math and science. How we do know this? Standardized testing.
SATs are standardized testing. ACTs are standardized testing. So are the Stanford acheivement tests.
Is it not important to have a measurement of how we are doing in education? Isn't a large part of education an accumulation of knowledge and an ability to process information presented? Standardized testing seems to me to be a good way of doing that.
Part of education has to be rote memorization. Knowing facts. Part has to be deductive reasoning. In "teaching the test", aren't we giving them the ability to do that? To meet certain minimal requirements? For math, the students are not given the problems and given the answers and forced to memorize them. They are taught the process of how to come to the answer, and that is how they come up with the solutions to problems on standardized tests.
I guess I don't see the problem with expectations of students knowing certain things at a certain age and having tests to see if the educators are doing their jobs.
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