Testing is my Life: An Editorial

(Photo Courtesy: Cloud Ops)

I live and breath for testing. Not by choice, this is not a preference. It’s forced. I memorize information for weekly, sometimes daily quizzes. I pull my hair out over end of unit testing every few weeks. I spend months studying for my quarter finals, a full trimester dreading Galileo testing and the whole year cramming information into my brain for SAGE testing. School is no longer about learning. School is about testing. My life is now about testing.

“Nobody knows what the point of some state testing is, which makes people less apt to try hard on them. It feels pointless, time-consuming and frustrating.” Says Park City student, Sam.

There is something wrong about a place that exists for the soul purpose of instruction being more about evaluation than actually learning the information we are being evaluated on. 

Of course, there is value in testing. Without it, how will the teacher’s know if the students are understanding the curriculum. It is when testing becomes the emphasis, that things start to go wrong. Learning should be the emphasis. We should come to school, not to scrap an A on a state test, but to learn the information for the sake of learning it.

“With all of the testing one tenth of of my instructional time is taken by testing. I think students are burnt out.”

Right now, past half way through fourth quarter, students are being swarmed with tests. Galileo testing was last week, SAGE is coming up next week, and this week there are countless reading comprehension tests, language vocal quizzes, geometry tests, etc.

Here are some thoughts on testing from Junior High Teacher, Julie Hooker, “Galileo has potential to inform my instruction. However, our time is so limited that we are unable to analyze the data effectively and alter the test questions to reflect our teaching. Because Sage testing happens at the end of the year and we don’t get the results until the end of the next year, it is difficult to use that assessment to inform instruction for the current class.”