Answer:
Explanation:
Standardized tests: You couldn’t have gotten into Pepperdine without taking at least a few of them, and even before the dreaded SAT or ACT, there was a slew of standardized tests throughout primary and secondary school.
But why?
Standardized tests began in the U.S. “as the Industrial Revolution … took school-age kids out of the farms and factories and put them behind desks, standardized examinations emerged as an easy way to test large numbers of students quickly,” according to the TIME Magazine article “Standardized Testing” published Dec. 11, 2009 by Dan Fletcher.
As time went on, the SAT and ACT tests were created to test students entering college, then when No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2001, the lucky students in grades 3 through 8 (yay us!) were required to take standardized tests every year in order to determine the quality of public education for all students, according to the PBS.org article “No Child Left Behind – The New Rules.”
The problem is, standardized tests aren’t an accurate measure of the quality of a student’s education, or even of a student’s intellect. These tests often show inherent biases. In a 2013 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation titled “Early Warning Confirmed” describes how “researchers of the poverty/achievement connection have quantified the gap between children from low-income and wealthier families and tracked the gap’s growth over time.
An analysis of data from 19 nationally representative studies by Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon found that the gap between children of families from the lowest and highest quartiles of socioeconomic status is more than one standard deviation on reading tests at kindergarten entry, an amount equal to roughly three to six years of learning in middle or high school.”
