According to experts, there are many potential cons of standardized tests, and most of them come from the way they can change the teaching process. If everyone knows in advance that there is a standardized test being used to make judgments about a student’s performance, then the strategy for teaching that student will often change. Some worry that teachers may focus almost entirely on making sure that the student does well on the test, even to the point of ignoring important aspects of the subject that aren’t going to be tested. Some other potential cons of standardized tests include their potential lack of flexibility and the fact that memorization is often good enough to allow students to pass even if they don’t really know the subjects very well.
Sometimes standardized testing is used to rank the performance of schools when it comes to funding from government bodies. In those cases, all the administration officials at the school sometimes put a lot of pressure on teachers to make sure their students do very well on the tests. This can lead to a total change in the way students are taught. Some experts believe that many students in these kinds of classes may not actually be learning as much as they could. Even though they may pass the test in question, it is possible that they might not have a real grasp of the subject.
The reason for these worries, and one of the biggest potential cons of standardized tests, is memorization. When students study a subject, and the primary goal is simply to remember certain facts, they might not really understand the important lessons they are being taught. For example, if students learn the technical name of some scientific term, they might be able to pass a test that requests that name as an answer, but they might not really understand the fundamentals of the subject, and if the teachers know that the students won’t really need a deep understanding, some worry that they might be satisfied to only teach the surface elements.
One of the other potential cons of standardized tests is the fear that they may penalize certain students unnecessarily. According to experts, some people simply do very poorly on tests even though they have a good understanding of a subject, something that happens sometimes for psychological reasons, and sometimes because of learning disabilities. There are also people with unconventional ways of thinking that might deserve to pass because of other qualities that don’t show up on a test score, but which teachers could probably see if they were simply doing an evaluation.