Testing is a common subject lingered on in school, especially considering the effect it has on students’ future. However, the circumstances of school-wide testing makes it difficult for results to be accurate, therefore skewing results and not showing a student’s true potential. Student success should not be defined by school testing.
Testing puts pressure on students of all ages, regardless of their aptitudes or abilities. On average, students are tested once in each class biweekly. In an average 38-week school year, this amounts to approximately 133 tests annually for one student.
This number does not include AP exams and state-standardized tests such as the ACT or SAT. This amount of testing puts an extreme amount of pressure on students, especially during their teenage years, negatively impacting their mental health.
“The anxiety caused by imminent, high-stakes tests leaked into daily life and were ‘correlated with poor health behaviors, including dysregulated sleep patterns and poor sleep quality,’ leading to a ‘vicious cycle’ of cramming and poor sleep,” said Youki Terada, staff writer for Edutopia.
Not only does testing affect mental health, but it leads to an increased risk of health factors among students like insomnia and hives. According to the article “The Psychological Toll of High-Stakes Testing” from edutopic.org, testing leads to health concerns such as insomnia.
Testing not only invokes worse health, but also causes a large portion of students to become victims of brain fog, which decreases mental clarity and shows abundantly on their test scores, inaccurately showing their abilities.
Yet another way testing negatively affects students’ lives is the way in which they are focused. Student testing environments do not allow for real world association, which causes a lack of interest. In fact, a multitude of people I know recount that it feels impossible to focus in unfamiliar environments, especially when a good portion of the testing curriculum does not truly align with college readiness.
Testing, especially standardized testing, is done within a highly regulated environment where students feel suffocated. The intent is to enhance students’ focus, but it turns out the majority of the time, the opposite is true. Since success is highly correlated to a person’s environment, taking students and placing them in a dull room causes them to become relatively uninterested because it does not simulate the real world. Students, specifically students from low-income households, are most affected by high-stakes environments due to factors that put excessive pressure on their futures.
“Students from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, with both the highest rate of poverty and crime, saw the largest changes in cortisol in advance of testing, suggesting that their scores were the most affected — and therefore the least valid measures of what they actually knew,” said Grace Tatter, staff writer for Harvard School of Education.
When students are asked to test, it’s important to consider the effects it may have on their psyche beforehand. Test results are not the be-all end-all of student performance; factors like extracurricular activities and student lifestyle should be taken into consideration before schools use their own curriculums to define success. Student success should not be defined by school testing.
