Making the Grade

After reading many articles in this class it seems in my opinion that everything usually revolves around standardized testing in some way shape or form.  I believe that it is just something that our country cannot get away from.

After reading the article "Making the Grade" it made me feel as if testing is merely given to countries for competition.  It is a way of ranking countries based on their students abilities.  I personally don't agree with this, because I am not a competitive person.  I think that tests are not an accurate view of what students are capable of, so to rank countries based on these tests I think is a false reading.  I think that it shouldn't matter which country is better in whatever subject, I think the only thing that should matter is that our students are receiving a good education.

A quote from the article that I really liked was, "It is misleading to gauge the relative position of the United States in the world based on a simplistic ranking of its students' test scores.  This is much like measuring shoe size to predict runners' future race times while ignoring their past performance."  I think that this is very true about test scores and testing in general.  Testing does not take into account students past experiences or anything else for that matter.  All testing shows is the students ability to memorize facts and recall pointless information.