Standardized tests

This reading is intended to talk about standardized tests that in fact, they play an important role in education since they are necessary and sometime useful, but in the same breath they are really harmful because they are not objective.

I would like to point out some disadvantages standardized tests have; for instance, as I said before the only objective thing standardized tests have is scoring, when done by an accurately programmed machine. But deciding what items to include on the test, how questions are worded, which answers are scored as "correct,” and the uses of exam results are all made by subjective human beings. On the other hand, these kinds of tests are very poor in the sense that they don’t improve critical thinking skills of student learning. They are weak measures of the ability to comprehend complex material. Besides, these tests do not help a teacher understand what to do next in working with a student because they do not indicate how the student learns or thinks.

Anyway they also have some advantages, for example they are easier to score, they are useful for some institutions in order to level some students, and they are necessary to take when an English teacher wants to get a better job or keep studying. It is very important here in Colombia and I guess that in other countries is the same.  I am going to give an example, it happened to a friend of mine; he applied for a job in an English Institute here in Bucaramanga, and everything was going good till the coordinator asked him for a certification of any test, and my friend said he didn’t have any test certification, so he couldn’t get the job just for this reason.

As a short conclusion I would say that standardized tests are not fear enough, or objective, but they are necessary and useful sometimes, so we sooner or later we as future teachers have to face them.

 

Standards-based Assessment

This article talks mainly about Standards-based assessment which is a type of assessment or a test and its information and criteria is based on contents that students have been taught or are expected to learn. Then, it is different to achievement tests which examine more generalized knowledge as I mention in the previous session. Standards-based assessment lets students know against which criteria teacher will judge their work, and the standards attached to each of these criteria. It tells students what performance is required and allows you to make comparisons between students based on their achievement of the standards.

Here in Colombia there are some standards-based tests such as ICFES and Saber-Pro. I had to take the first one, because in Colombia is really important to get high score in that one if you want to enter to a public institution. It was like 12 years ago; but I wanted to enter to a public university, so I had to take it again due to the fact that the first one wasn’t be really good. The point is that I studied in a small town located to the North of Colombia and I never received any training before taking that test. We never had told what this test consisted of, how long it was, and so on.

So, for those reasons I would say that here in Colombia for public education those kinds of assessments are not achieving the established standards, so they need to be improved every day in schools by engaging, fostering, and training nor only students but also teachers in order to fulfill the main objective proposed in the Colombia Education System.