The History and Problems of Standardized Testing

History of Standardized Testing

Developed in early China, standardizing testing has been used throughout the centuries to judge how well people conform to an ideal. In the United States, however, history points us to the mid-1800s where we begin to see the introduction of formal assessments to understand more holistically what a student knows.

Teaching as a profession was not a career commonly chosen by people who were educated. In fact, almost anyone without any certain skill could become a teacher.

In 1837 an individual named Horace Mann became the Secretary of Education in Massachusetts and would end up changing the way we evaluate students and teachers forever. Horace Mann was a politician who was affiliated with the Whigs, a prominent political party in the mid 19th century. Mann spent much of his life committed to promoting public education. Once he became the Secretary of Education, he worked towards creating a system of professional teachers. He based his system on the Prussian model of “Common Schools.”

The idea was to create an educational system that allowed all students the same access to education. The Prussian system was made up of eight years of courses to teach students the basics like reading and writing, but also to introduce students to music and religion.

In 1838 Horace Mann published The Common School Journal. He had six principles that he used to influence how public schooling should change which are as follows:

1. Citizens cannot maintain both ignorance and freedom
2. Education should be paid for, controlled and maintained by the public
3. Education should be provided in schools that embrace children from varying backgrounds
4. Education must be nonsectarian
5. Education must be taught using tenets of a free society
6. Education must be provided by well-trained professional teachers

Interestingly enough, over the course of the next 150 years, education most definitely took dramatic shifts towards these 6 principles Mann outlined in his journal.

In 1845 Horace Mann had something new he wanted to try. Up until this time, students participated in an annual oral exam. It was here that he suggested to the Boston Public School that children should actually demonstrate their knowledge through written tests. The shift to written exams was meant to provide metrics in which they could use to judge the output of each school and as a product, they could gather objective information about teaching quality.

In 1848 Horace Mann introduces a technique that by and large we still use today. The technique — grouping students by age. This was again based on the Prussian model. He also instituted lectures as a primary way of teaching which was commonly seen in European universities. This forced students to learn from instruction as opposed to working together and instructing each other.

Mann won over educators, pushing many states to adopt his methods of schooling. This is where we really establish a common education across the United States. As students completed their coursework, they then received a certificate to acknowledge their completion which eventually transitioned into the graduation ceremonies many of us are familiar with today.

Skipping a few decades forward, we land in the 1890s where Harvard President, Charles William Eliot, introduces an entrance exam for colleges and professional schools across the United States. After Eliot had instated his entrance exam, colleges across the United States began doing the same. This ended up greatly affecting the way boarding schools and high schools shaped their curriculums to fit the high expectations of Harvard.

In 1899 the College Entrance Examination Board was founded at Columbia University and had representatives from 12 universities and 3 high schools. In 1901 the first exams were administered across the United States in 9 subjects.

In 1905, Alfred Binet, a french psychologist is credited with inventing the first IQ test, known as the Binet-Simon test. The French Ministry of Education called upon Alfred to create a test that would find students who did not learn effectively from the regular classroom.

In 1912, Lewis Terman, an American psychologist and author conducting much of his research at Stanford took Alfred Binet’s work and used it to create a longitudinal study of children with high IQs called the Genetic Studies of Genius better known today as the Terman Study of the Gifted. The test is considered the oldest and longest-running longitudinal study in the field of psychology.

A few years later in 1914, Frederick J. Kelly invented the multiple-choice, which to Kelly was known as the Kansas Silent Reading Test. The multiple-choice test was created to address a national crisis the United States was facing. In a matter of a few decades, The United States had grown from 200,000 immigrants in 1890 to over 1.5 million. As no surprise, the use of multiple-choice increased the nation’s efficiency in scoring students.

In 1926, the United States received it’s first standardized college admissions test — the SAT which stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test but was updated stand for Scholastic Assessment Test and now is just simply called the SAT. The SAT is administered by the College Board who in 2016 released a redesigned version of the SAT. Throughout the 20s, 30s, and 40s, we see other tests become major players in the market like the MCAT, GRE, LSAT.

By 1930, multiple-choice tests had taken over the United States. With almost all major testing being done through multiple-choice testing, critics began to discuss the limits of a multiple-choice test. The reason provided to continue with multiple-choice testing was because of the efficiency and objectivity that these tests provided.

In 1959, the United States was introduced to the ACT which stands for the American College Testing. Both the ACT and SAT had very similar formats back in 1959 and still do today. When the ACT was first offered, students were tested over in English, Math, Social Studies, and Science. In 1989 that changed, the ACT replaced Social Studies with a Reading section and the Sciences was renamed to Science Reasoning which by and large gives us the test we see today. In 2005, the writing test was added to the ACT, and in 2017 we saw the first administered ACT on a computer.

1965 was when President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as part of his “War or Poverty.” This program was created by the United States Department to address a number of issues with the education system in America. The basis was to create a higher standard of testing and make education more equitable.

George W. Bush introduced the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 to further reform education and push state-mandated standardized testing in order to better assess school performance. This act would become the driving factor in the way states would receive funding for their programs. If the government felt that a school wasn’t adequately performing, the federal government would come to the school and try to instate newer, so-called better practices.

Under the Obama administration, the “No Child Left Behind Act” was repealed and replaced with the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” which still requires schools to administer standardized tests from third through eighth grade. It did, however, relieve the government from having to step in and try to fix a school if it was not performing to standards.

This brings us to the present day. Where standardized testing is critical to a student’s ability to receive scholarships, gain admittance into universities, or even progress through their primary and secondary schooling.

Problems, Ethics, and Efficacy of Standardized Testing

The MCAT came under fire in the 1930s for asking multiple-choice questions that really seemed more like a memorization test than a practical application test.

In 2005 Les Perelman from MIT conducted a study over the essay portion of the SAT. Perelman reported a high correlation between the length of the essay and the score received. He eventually was able to predict with great accuracy the score of an essay without even reading what the test participant had written. He also noted that the essays were not deducted points for factual inaccuracies. This eventually led the new President of the College Board, David Coleman, to no longer make the SAT writing portion mandatory for students in 2013.

As of last year, the College Board charges 47 cents per name to access student information. Both the College Board and the ACT have been sued for their use of private information. It is also clear that most students are not aware that these tests collect and sell their data playing into a major ethical debate around these standardized tests.

Standardized testing proves to continually have a low correlation to actual student results. In 2013 a study conducted over the GMAT found that the student’s score on the GMAT only had a .29 correlation to an MBA student’s first-year GPA and an undergraduate GPA had a .35 correlation. Another study done by Chicago State University confirmed that high schoolers’ grades predict first-year college grades better than the ACT. In their study, they found that the ACT only explained 3.6% of the differences in cumulative college GPA.

Even worse, a survey of over 20,000 public school teachers in 2012 published in Education Week concluded that educators did not find standardized testing to be valuable in measuring and evaluating student learning.

On one hand, multiple-choice tests do have some positive benefits. They are considered objective, not because it is an accurate measure of what a child knows but rather there are no subjective elements in the grading. In the early days of standardized testing, the teachers all had a grading key and regardless of what a teacher may have thought about a student or their answer, there was no way not to award a student of the points they deserved for answering correctly.

On the other hand, when we really get down to the multiple-choice testing format it becomes clear that many of us agree, these tests are simply too crude to be used and should be abandoned. But don’t take my word for it, take Frederick J. Kelly’s, the individual who created multiple-choice tests and states:

These tests are too crude to be used and should be abandoned.
- Frederick J. Kelly

These tests have shown to be racist, classist, and sexist. For a majority of students across America, being able to live in an area with a school district that receives ample funding means, having a family income to put that family in a house within that district. These tests are not considered cheap for many families. With standardized tests continually increasing in price, families are having to spend more money per child to prepare a student for their upcoming tests. Extra tutoring is very expensive and unaffordable for most families. And while a lot of resources are now available online, it is still unfair to assume that all students have access to a computer in their home.

When the stakes rise, people seek help anywhere they can find it, and companies eager to profit from this desperation by selling test-prep materials and services have begun to appear on the scene, most recently tailoring their products to state exams.

Moreover, when underprivileged or Title 1 schools do manage to scrape together enough money to buy these materials, it’s often at the expense of books and other educational resources that they really need.

Because public schools today receive funding largely based on test scores, it shouldn’t come as a shock why underperforming schools remain underperforming.

A report published by the College Board in 2013 showed that students from families making less than $20,000/year averaged a combined score of 1,326 compared to 1,714 points for students from families making more than $200,000/year.

Alfie Kohn writes that our children are tested to an extent that is unprecedented in our history and unparalleled anywhere else in the world. While previous generations of American students have had to sit through tests, these tests have never been given so frequently, and never have they played such a prominent role in schooling. The current situation is also unusual from an international perspective: few countries use standardized tests for children below high school age — or multiple-choice tests for students of any age.

As a result, schools across the country are cutting back or even eliminating programs in the arts, recess for young children, electives for high schoolers, class meetings, discussions about current events, the use of literature in the early grades, and entire subject areas such as science. Anyone who doubts the scope and significance of what is being sacrificed in the desperate quest to raise scores has not been inside a school lately.

In 1968 George Land tested 1,600 children around the age of 5 years old who were enrolled in the Head Start program. This test was devised to understand the creativity and genius level of a child. Around the age of 5, 98% of the kids scored within the genius level. That number dropped to 30% by age 10, and to 12% by age 15. The same test was given to 280,000 adults over the age of 25 where only 2% of participants scored at genius level.

This 1968 study shows two things. First and foremost, it shows us that we all have the capacity to think divergently. The second is that most of us end up becoming educated out of our creativity. Standardized tests have driven us to think more convergently which inadvertently teaches students that there is one right answer — it’s in the back of the book.

In the end, it is clear education has become a product of standardized testing as opposed to standardized testing being a product of education.

What’s your opinion?

Education is one of those topics that is fascinating to discuss because it truly has had an impact on each of our lives. Share your opinion on standardized testing and the future of education below.