Blog Debate- 1st Argument

Prompt 220: How well do you think standardized tests measure your abilities?

                These days you’ll see many students stressing about standardized tests. People spend years preparing for them, as they most definitely shape what high school and college you’re going to, and perhaps even what job you’ll have in the future. Another thing you’ll hear students talking about is whether or not this is fair. Do these tests do an effective job at gauging ones intelligence? I personally don’t think so. We learn in school for almost twenty years, and we spend about a week (at most) taking these standardized tests. There’s no way that such a short time period can even scratch the surface of what people learn while they’re at school.     

               For one thing, most of these tests only question about three subjects: math, reading, and writing. At GS, did we not spend our freshman year learning 5 other subjects at the same time? While perhaps all of these subjects were encompassed by these three main things, I still believe it is an egregious oversimplification. Secondly, these tests do not measure any real-world abilities well. Sure, you can hire the person who scored a 2400 on his SAT, but what do you know of his problem-solving skills? His multi-tasking? His ability to work well with others? Nothing. These tests are fundamentally flawed in the fact that they only test you on things you can recite from memory. More complicated things, the real skills that are required for healthy living, are never even looked at.
             
                Humans are so much more than computers. We have personalities, awareness, and emotions. There are infinitely more aspects to life than arithmetic, being able to correct a sentence, and filling in bubbles on a scoring sheet. While scoring well on a tests means you have someone whose good at those things, it by no means gives any indication of how he/she performs doing anything else. After all, we don’t even know the full picture about how the brain works! Right now, we say intelligence is how smart someone is. But what is “smart”. Explain to me the scientific difference in a “smart” person’s brain and a “dumb” person’s brain. And if one person excels at sports, yet the other is a keen reader, then which one is “smarter”? It’s a ridiculous question. If being smart means you think quickly, and do well in a certain thing, wouldn’t that make them both smart? The mind is too complicated to measure it in one dimension, on one scale. Intelligence cannot be tested when we don’t even understand what we’re testing. Such a narrow test as these standardized tests only shed light on the smallest point of a person’s abilities (if even that).
              
               Standardized testing, perhaps all testing in general, is simply inadequate when trying to judge the full scale of a person’s skills. When you test on a certain thing, you get an idea of the person’s ability to do well in that thing. But standardized tests don’t want to admit that that’s all they’re good for. They believe that a person’s abilities in all aspects of life can be measured with three subjects, and that a person’s path in life should be pivotal on a person’s performance on one day. That is the problem with these tests. “Intelligence” these days is becoming an outdated term, because it has too narrow a definition. If someone is not good at something, then surely they must excel at something else. Secondly, as we have heard our soon-to-retire headmaster say, intelligence is not fixed. It can grow in any direction, and a person’s ability to do something may change over time. In general, these standardized tests are trying to get a sense of an entire quilt with a pair of tweezers. Sure, you’ll get a get a really good idea of what that particular thread looks like, but you’re just kidding yourself if you think you know the entire quilt, the human being, based on that thread.