For all of you in Pensylavanaia, or at least in my school, Tuesday through Thursday you will be taking the "Teranovas", which is a standardized test to determine where the school stands, the education level, what needs to be improved on, and how the teachers are doing. However, while these tests may have good intentions, I don't see the actual benefit from them, and I'll tell you now.

Let's start with the most obvious, basically there is a week less of school I'll have. While as a individual this is smiled upon but in reality it's a week less learning, so instead of cramming everything in the last 2 days, I could have had it done. This isn't really a huge deal but you get the picture.

A huge point of my argument is that the tests are graded by computers, and as study's have shown, it's not effective as you think. There have been reports of students getting incorrectly graded tests back and even worse, students who turned in blank answer sheets and still received a grade. Now I will be first one to admit that logic isn't exactly my thing but seriously? This clearly shows the inconsistency of the grading system, so how can we trust it with teachers jobs.

Let's think about the students. They spend all year preparing for this "big test" and then hours and days taking it yet to find out that they don't see the questions they missed, what they did wrong, or anything to correct them from making the mistakes again. I think that's about the dumbest logic a idiot could make up.

I'm a sophomore in high school, and always get proficient or advance on my Teronovas/PSSAs. I'm fully against standardized testing, or at least the magnitude of which it's carried out. I think that we should test every class very briefly just to assure that they are learning and then test them again in another 2 years. I understand that these tests are theoretically essential and would be fine except a few things in the system need to be corrected.

Any thoughts?



*Try to look past my grammar, I had little time to proof read.