Question: Do standardized tests improve education?

Title: Education: Testing Content: Standardized testing, if anything, has not improved student achievement. In 2002, the US slipped from the 18th spot in the world for math scores, to the 31st slot in 2009. This drop was due to standardized tests and the stress they put on the students (1). The failing attempt to improve the test scores have gotten worse as the tests get harder, which also only test a small portion of the curriculum in schools. Math and reading courses have been told to teach different information in order to cover the tests questions, resulting in a lack of regular curricular (2). (1) http://standardizedtests.procon.org... (2) http://www.education.com...

Title: Resolved on balance Content: Resolved: on balance, standardized testing is beneficial to k-12 education in the United States.

Title: Standardized testing should remain in our schools. Content: Alright, wrap up. Standardized testing fails at assessing every one's knowledge to full extend due to the lack of open answer questions, which has been proven to be the ideal way to asses knowledge.Standardized testing favors and rewards proficient students (scholarships when you get a perfect SAT score) and discriminates and punishes students under proficiency (getting put into special ed programs, not getting into colleges that they wish to attend).Standardized testing is riducously expensive (http://www.huffingtonpost.com...), and that money could go towards much better programs that actually improve the education provided in schools. So my question to you is, if it is proven not to truly asses a students knowledge, if it barres lower scoring students from succeeding in life, and if it cost an absolute absurd amount of money every year, money that could be better spend on other projects, why do we still have standardized tests?(Good luck on your debate, good idea of doing this on here before you have the real debate, that way you can really see your opponents viewpoint and main arguments, and you can fine tune your own argument. I will see you around!)

Title: Standardized Tests Content: My opponent is worried that students will only do well on standardized tests and it won't improve anything. The problems with tests is that their different. Tests are different between each school and each teacher often. This allows for some student not to have learned things while others have. Which creates an unbalanced classroom where some students are struggling to learn material and others are bored because they had already learned it. In fact a study has shown that 79% of students think that standard tests are fair. My opponent is also worried that it restricts creativity of thinking. A test is to test your knowledge. Grades 1-12 are there to teach you the basics of a wide range of knowledge. Tests are there to see if you get what you are learning. Standard tests already have questions that promote creative thinking. Teaching for the test is a good thing. It eliminates time wasting activities. It focuses on the content and that way the students will all learn the same thing and no student will be left behind. Standardized tests do not narrow the curriculum. It focuses the curriculum. The multiple choice is actually helpful in improving the education system because it produces accurate information. Also the markings for standardized tests are fair. Teacher markings are not fair because the teacher may not like a child and mark their test harder than others. If you don't believe me China is living proof that standard tests work. They have a set of standard tests and they are leading the world when it comes to academics.

Title: Resolved: Standardized test scores accurately reflect the academic value of students. Content: Closing Argument: In my closing argument I will list some reasons for why standardized testing is an efficient way to reflect the academic value of students. 1. Gardner states "achievement data from tests provide teachers with valuable information to improve classroom and student learning". This is yet another quote that supports my claim that the tests to help to improve academics in class rooms. 2. Standardized testing is the best way to know how a student is doing. If schools were to go onto one on one testing it will incredibly time consuming. Also, my opponent said something about a child having problems at home. Believe it or not, a teacher can know if something is wrong from the results of an examination. 4. Standardized tests are also helpful in providing students with the pressure of taking education seriously. Many students want to go to college and they know that in order to get into a respectable college they have to score decent grades in the SAT. This "pressure" will cause them to take education seriously and will be beneficial in the long run. Now, I want to leave my opponent and all voters with this quote, "While there are many purposes that can be served by assessment, they are all secondary to the improvement of student learning." Thanks to my opponent for this great debate and I wish all voters will vote Pro. Thank you.

Title: end national testing Content: National, standardized tests are a poor measure of student learning

Title: Resolved: Public high school students in the United States ought be required to pass standardize Content: I accept my opponents definition of a standardized test in the sense that, in theory, standardized tests try to achieve the guidelines presented in the definition. I reserve the right to challenge the definition in later rounds. I will start by stating my contentions then refuting any brought up by my opponent. What is the point of school? To learn the last time I checked! Learning is defined as: acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesizing different types of information. [1] Schools seek to achieve this through the classroom; however, possible. I believe standardized testing impedes on a schools ability to to just that: help students learn. If we look at state's education systems today we will see that almost every states already require standardized tests for high students graduate. In fact 2/3 of students our already required to take them to pass. [9] This is an effect of No Child Left Behind requiring them to receive certain funding. [8] Looking at these we can see many of the failures that standardized testing plagues our education system with. [A] It's not fair to judge the ability of someone's entire academic career on whether or not they answer A, B, C or D on a test at one time. There is so much more to learning then that! What if you're a bad test taker? What if you got sick during the test? What if I have to go to the bathroom during the test? What if I'm just plain nervous? To know if you could pass or fail high school on the basis of 1 test it very intimidating to most students. To truly gauge a what a person has learned you must look at what they have achieved over the period of their academic career, not just 1 test. [B] Standardized testing funnels money from other subjects. If we look to No Child Left behind as an example, we can see that since it's passage 22 percent of elementary school leaders surveyed reported a decline in their art and music instruction. [2] If I want to be a preform in the arts when I grow up I won't have the skills I need because it was cut from my school to increase math education. This is not to say math is not important, but standardized testing that requires it to pass high school puts an overemphasis on it at the cost of other subjects. "Arts and cultural industries generate $1 .2 billion in revenues, $413 million in wages, and 19,500 jobs, totaling 6% of all employment in the County" [4] [C] High school exit exams have proven not to be any more beneficial then those not taking them in job readiness. Here are some highlights for a study done: "Young high school graduates who obtained their diplomas in exit exam states fared no better in the labor market than their peers who obtained their diplomas in other states. These findings held in states with minimum competency exit exams and in states with higher competency exit exams. They also held for students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds. " [3] If exit exams have no bearing a a student ability to succeed in a job, then why are we wasting time and money on them? [D] We are wasting time and money on exit exams. Not only our we wasting teaching time on taking a standardized test, but money as well. Consider the things that go preparing for a test and costs : Making the test (already costs thousands for many states), preparing for it (teachers must take time to be briefed on it, students also have to study (see point E for more info on that)), administering the test, (usually takes up to a day), grading it (think about having to grade MILLIONS OF TESTS, we do have electronic machines, but almost always someone has to go over it for mistakes. It also takes away time that could be used for teaching. )) [E] Teachers and students teach and study to the test. This creates a tunnel vision mentality where only the info that's going to be on the test is important. When you teach to the test you leave behind critical thinking skills. Just asking someone to answer A, B, C, or D does require one to look at a piece of information critically, instead their thinking only need graze the surface. [F] There's a strong luck component. If I only have to answer A, B, C, or D and I fail by one question, but the guys next to me passes by one question because he "guessed right" is that really fair? How does that demonstrate learning? Why should even some of a high schoolers grades to tied to something with such a high luck component? [G] If we wish to catch to other nations in the international ranking then we need to ditch standardized tests. Many other nations such as Ireland and Iceland do not use standardized testing as a means of grading students, instead electing to use performance based criteria to grade students. The ironic part of the whole situation is that they still score higher then us on international exams. Combine this with the fact we spend $9,666 a pupil [5] which is less then Ireland, Iceland, and New Zealand, but still got outperformed on international standardized test. [6] [1] . http://tinyurl.com... [2] . http://tinyurl.com... [3] . http://tinyurl.com... [4] . http://tinyurl.com... [5] . http://tinyurl.com... [6] . http://tinyurl.com... [8] . http://tinyurl.com... [9] . http://tinyurl.com... Standardized testing does nothing but hinder learning. The resolution is negated. 1. Purposes of a diploma I fail to see how this relates the resolution whatsoever. 2. Standardized tests certify level of accomplishment A standardized test merely means you are accomplished in selecting A, B, C, or D as the answer. As you'll see in my contention [C] this idea is supported. If standardized tests verify accomplishment shouldn't we see a difference in job readiness? "The standards for the tests should be provided by the states and the tests built, administered, and graded by an independent organization, much in the way that SAT and similar tests are performed. " If each state has a different test, is it really standardized? "By keeping the tests basic, students who do not do well under the pressure of test conditions can still pass. However, student who cannot muster basic skills under test conditions cannot be expected to call up those skills under job pressures as well, so they ought not receive diplomas. " So by making an easy test everyone can pass it! Wait, doesn't that diminish the accomplishment of passing the test? This contention would seem to contradict your earlier statement: "The valid public purpose is to certify a level of competence to prospective employers and to schools beyond high school having admission standards. " 3. Standardized tests establish school performance Once again this school performance only assess what the test is administered on. State's tests are almost exclusivity focused on math, reading, and science. A school has a hard time offering other subjects is they receive funding solely based on the performance of these subjects. "Employers today consider high school diplomas only as proof that 18-year-olds attended school, according to a study released February 9 by the American Diploma Project, a consortium of three education-reform groups. . .. The project's two-year review of education in five states found that more than half of high school graduates need remedial classes in college, and most who attend college never obtain a four-year degree. Employers rated high school graduates as "fair" or "poor" on basic abilities. " Hmmm… considering that already ⅔ of students are required already to take standardized test, this would seem to prove that standardized tests are not working. My space is limited so I had to cut my contentions and response short. More to come in round 2. I request that my opponent please number his contentions so save space when responding to them. I look forward to the rest of this debate!

Title: Test Content: This hasn't been much of a debate. Let me sum up my opinion to the voters, though, to garner their votes and opinions on the controversial issue of standardized testing. I am against standardized testing because it has had a negative effect on the state of American education. When standardized testing was fully enforced, the US ranked 18th in math. Seven years later, seven years of standardized testing, the US fell to 31st in math. No improvements, whatsoever. Second, testing rushes teachers and students; as an effect, students don't fully understand the subjects. They remember it for a while, and then it fades from memory. What I support is quality education, education that isn't concerned about tests that don't prove any true statistics. I support the removal of standardized testing from our education system. I believe it is a unbeneficial, untruthful way of measuring students' intelligence. I have backed up my claim with facts and statistics from an unbiased website. My opponent only typed one word in this entire debate - 'testing' - which does not even support his pro-testing argument. Voters, I hope this is an easy debate to decide on, no matter which side you truly support.

Title: on balance standardized testing is benifical for k-12 education Content: Hello! my name is Thomas brooks and I stand in affirmation of the resolved, On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K"12 education in the United States. We have three contentions to bring to you today. 1" standardized testing compares schools, 2" Standardised testing improves k"12 education, 3" On balance standardized testing has a positive effect on student achievement in school and in life. Point one) Without standardized testing, their would be no way to compare schools, and assure that they were meeting their constitutional standards. The fourteenth constitutional amendment requires fair and equal treatment to all, under protection of the law. The Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board of education in 1954, Officially legislated that the 14th amendment applied to all education laws. Therefore, It is our constitutional right to receive an equal education. If there is no way to compare schools, there is no way for individuals to know whether a student is receiving a substandard education, vandalising our constitutional right. Without standardized testing there would be no form of comparison and equality would not be obtainable. This leads us into our second point. Standardized testing has made tangible the quality of education a school provides, and created accountability in not just teachers and schools, but in districts and states . This has benefited educational mandates in funding in two irreplaceable ways. 1) The implementation of NCLB has enabled schools to sue states for failing to provide standard and adequate teaching facilities. Study conducted by David G. Sciarra, shows direct correlation to how the instatement of No Child Left Behind created accountability to state and government to provide a standard of school safety conditions. The study focuses on, but is not limited to a number of lawsuits in states New Jersey, Ohio, Alabama, Arkansas, New York, Wyoming, Arizona, Idaho, and California where severely underfunded schools that lacked resources, and dew to the passing of the NCLB had the legal grounds to obtaining equil funding and such from the state improving the education of their students. 2) The second way standardized tests have improved education is in actually reforming state legislature dictating funding. Since the 1970"s, when statewide standardized tests became more common, there was an increase of court cases discussing that different funding was required to support different schools. These arguments are called "adequacy" suits. The arguments are based in the belief that a school that supports a larger population of students, or educates students that live in poorer demographics need more state funding, and can not rely on property tax. Plaintiffs fundamentally rely upon low scores on standardized tests, and high dropout rates as proof that the state has failed to provide an adequate education for substantial numbers of its children. Standardized tests have created greater equality in school funding. Our Third contention is that on balance standardized testing has a positive effect on student achievement in school and in life. Test anxiety is real, and it is true that both high and low stakes standardized tests can create stress in K"12 students. However, post primary education is also depended on high stakes assessments, similar to those of standardized tests. Students who participate in standardized tests will be more prepared to face future educational, occupational, and professional goals. Such tests include those pertaining to college admission and success, occupational licensing for trades such as law and medicine. Standardised tests are the only way to insure that individuals have the capability to obtain and equal education, key in creating safe campuses, and fundamental in legislature allocating school funding. Furthermore, Standardized tests prepare students for the stress in taking high stakes tests later in their life. On balance, standardized tests are imperative to improving k"12 education, and benefit it in many ways.

Title: No Child Left Behind Act Content: Standardized tests poorly measure real student learning

Title: Standardized testing sets useful baseline achievement standards. Content: It is important that a nation has a general frame of reference on where students should, on average, be at various stages in their educational development. Standardized testing helps do this by setting a baseline level of achievement at each grade. While some students may perform above or below this standard, the important thing is judging the general educational trends across American society, so that we can help guide our national educational system onto a globally competitive path.

Title: Resolved: Standardized test scores accurately reflect the academic value of students. Content: First of all if you mean inconsistent in terms of a huge difference in results you are entirely wrong. Again, it will make no sense in the world for you to have major differentials between tests of the same subject. 1. Bruce Whitehead, author of "Using standardized test results as an instructional guide", states in his academic journal "One school was able to use standardized test scores to improve its curriculum as well as its educational policies." Extremely beneficial for schools and teachers are these tests. They provide a understanding of where a student stands. To my opponent, Tests are constantly worked upon to achieve perfection. Students themselves learn their weaknesses from examinations and use exams as a way to improve their academic standards. 2. My opponent does not seem to understand where im going with the educated guess respone. What I am saying is that students who do guess on tests do not do it for every single question and pass. Behind every guess is some strategy and something from a lesson must seem familiar to the student to choose his or her answer. Having to go to summer school as my opponent says, is not a curse. If you have to go to summer school is because you do not fully understand the material and your friend who made his guess and got it right most likely had some understanding of the question. Your friend had to have some background knowgledge of the material for him to even get close to passing the examination. 3. Teachers throughout the course of the year give students information as to what would be on standardized examinations and what to look out for. To those students who still feel pressure at the time of the test, I don't know what to say but we cannot just stop the tradtion and excellence of standardized testing for a handful of students who most of the time get through pressure with some counseling and help. I am happy you agree that it's silly. 4. Scores could with no doubt be used to improve teaching in the class rooms. The overall results of the class determine where they stand in general. Individually, students can be placed in classes with students who are also having a defiency in some aspect of the curriculum. Standardized testing proves to be efficient, not perfect of course, but a way to help students improve their academic value. Thanks to my opponent for this interesting debate. Vote for PRO!!! Good Luck 4.

Title: end national testing Content: National testing will improve educational equality

Title: rural life should be converted into urban areas Content: better education

Title: No Child Left Behind Act Content: Standardized testing sets useful baseline achievement standards.

Title: abolish standardized tests for University Admission Content: Standardized tests exaggerate small differences in performance

Title: abolish standardized tests for University Admission Content: Standardized tests result in teachers “teaching the test”

Title: Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States Content: Support for the Pro position of this resolution if bountiful and defensible in a properly framed debate. At the outset, the Pro debater needs to recognize there is significant negative press against standardized testing arising from a multitude of factors, many of which are unrelated to the question of whether or not standardized testing is beneficial to student education. These negative factors poison the well and spread the perception that because some elements related to standardized testing are undesirable, then standardized testing in general must be undesirable. This, of course, is a logical fallacy; a kind of fallacy of composition in which one draws conclusions about a whole based upon an examination of smaller portions. Standardized testing is a tool and like any tool can be designed for specific purposes. We shall examine those purposes and their effect on education and we will scratch the surface of an abundance of studies which measure the effect of testing on students. Much of the research extends back several decades and is still cited in research journals today. A Basic Definition To clarify the position, I will provide a definition for standardized tests which describes their nature and their purpose. JCCHD (undated): A Standardized test is a test that is given in a consistent or "standard" manner. Standardized tests are designed to have consistent questions, administration procedures, and scoring procedures. When a standardized test is administrated, is it done so according to certain rules and specifications so that testing conditions are the same for all test takers. Standardized tests come in many forms, such as standardized interviews, questionnaires, or directly administered intelligence tests. The main benefit of standardized tests is they are typically more reliable and valid than non-standardized measures. They often provide some type of "standard score" which can help interpret how far a child"s score ranges from the average. Based upon this definition we can surmise that the test may be administered by a school in accordance with some over-arching direction or purpose and may be required by local administration or government or at the state level. A key principle is the test must be administered and assessed in a standardized and consistent way aligned to the purpose it is designed to serve. Key Advantages Standardized tests offer advantages to school system administrators which are not possible with in-class testing and assessments designed and graded by teachers. The key advantages are objectivity, comparability, and accountability (Churchill 2015). Depending on the type of test one teacher's evaluation of a student's test may be different than another teacher's evaluation of the same student's test results. This variability can result from a lack of objectivity in the design or assessment of the test and lead to different impressions of a student's level of achievement. Standardized tests are designed to greatly reduce subjective grading. Often, standardized tests are assessed by computers rather than humans. Not only does this reduce costs by eliminating the need to pay graders, it enforces objective standards. The second major advantage is seen when a local school board needs to determine the overall level of achievement of, say sixth-graders in several different schools within their jurisdiction, Standardized tests ensure that all of the sixth-grade students will be evaluated on a common, objective standard. This allows a fair evaluation of sixth-grade achievement and helps determine which schools or classes may be in need of improvement. Objectivity and comparability are both necessary to realize the advantages linked to accountability. School system administrators use the tests as a feedback mechanism for the schools and classes to alter curriculum or resources in such a way they can benefit student achievement. Accountability requires the individual schools and instructors demonstrate forward progress in achieving the goals of the school administration. From Feedback to Blowback I do want to spend a little time discussing the downside of standardized tests because I believe a thorough evaluation and acknowledgement of problems increases the Pro ethos. Accountability is pushed by governments intent on maximizing their educational dollars. Obviously, an administration concerned with high costs will tend to view standardized tests as a mechanism for achieving goals for the least cost. First, the cost of testing is relatively cheap and secondly standardized tests can potentially isolate problems in individual schools, classrooms, or teachers putting increased pressure on those systems and individuals. Moreover, politicians can use accountability to enhance their own political statuses. Merrow (2001): But the fundamental problem is that many schools and school districts use standardized test results more for accountability than understanding or diagnosis. I'm not blaming educators for this situation, because they're only following orders. H. D. Hoover of the University of Iowa defends testing but agrees we've gone overboard. He places the blame squarely on politicians. "They want quick fixes, and they like tests because they're cheap. They mandate external tests because to the public it looks like they're doing something about education when all they're doing is actually a very inexpensive 'quick fix.'" When accountability increases pressure on school districts in a heavy-handed way, students are often re-categorized for failure to demonstrate achievement above a particular "cut-line" which alarms and often angers parents. Teachers are pressured to increase the performance of students and some teachers are viewed as professionally incompetent. All of this pressure results in negative attitudes about standardized testing and leads to abuses which have resulted in overly narrowed curriculum which focus entirely on the tests, and in extreme cases, cheating. All of these negative impressions ripple through communities and result in the perception standardized tests are the problem. The link between the home and the administration is the classroom and the teachers themselves play a significant role in the success or failure of the testing programs. Brown & Hattie (2012): The belief systems of teachers are a significant factor in whether standardized tests can be educationally useful. Clearly, pre-existing beliefs that standardized tests are irrelevant can and will influence how teachers respond to the possibility of using tests educationally. But there are other options for understanding the purpose and nature of assessment; assessment can evaluate schools, it can evaluate or certify students, and it can be for improvement (Brown, 2008). For example, in the development of the asTTle standardized tests system, it was found that teachers who endorsed the conception of assessment related to "assessment is powerful for improving teaching" had higher interpretation scores on a test about the meaning of the asTTle test score reports (r = .34). In contrast, teachers who endorsed more strongly the conception of assessment as a means of evaluating or holding schools accountable had the lowest interpretation scores (r = -.21) (Hattie et al. 2006).Thus, successful use of standardized tests requires believing that they can contribute to improved teaching and student learning for the individuals in a teacher"s class. This belief leads to more accurate interpretation to the educationally useful information communicated in standardized test reports.[290] We can see tests as simple measuring systems which serve as an important tool in guiding the educational development of students. Ultimately it is how those tools are used and people's attitudes about how the tools are used which guides perception of whether or not the tests are beneficial. No doubt it guides the perception of the PF debate judge as well.

Title: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States Content: First, addressing my opponents observation of my plagiarism. I have given credit to Lisa Adams as stated: Lisa Adams, Research Associate, Joseph Pedulla, Professor at Boston College, George Madaus, Professor at Boston College, 2003, Theory into practice, 42.1, p. 18-29 I would also like to point out that the link my opponent has posted is not valid. May I also ask for the source for your definition of Standardized Testing? Contention 1: Notice how my opponent said that the only way for a child to retain information is through a standardized test. However, that is not always true. Although there are students who study and remember information, many teachers will FOCUS on the test, and afterwards, forget about making sure the students remember. This is called teaching to the test. Many students will remember the information ONLY for the test, and not for remembering information in the future. Contention 2: Yes, standardized tests can compare students, but is that necessarily good? Like you stated in your last contention, standardized tests can BOOST your confidence, but when you are compared with other students for other districts, doesn't that tear down your confidence, knowing that colleges are looking for smart people and you just aren't the smartest. Also, as I pointed out in my case, standardized testing can discriminate against students who have just moved here from foreign countries, or their families are too poor to help provide a stable learning system. This can create achievement gaps between them and middle and upper class students who are given plenty of tools and guides to help their education. Contention 3: As my entire contention three says, teachers are often hurt by standardized tests, because it forces them to teach something they aren't used to teaching. I would also like to say that my opponent's "professionals" are just teachers and parents. And although they are somewhat connected to standardized tests(their students take the tests), they don't have the right to be called "professionals". Adding to that, notice how the resolution says "beneficial". This means that my opponent should focus on how it is "beneficial", not teachers having a bias towards standardized testing. Contention 4: I have done my own part of research. and have found that standardized testing is actually only a quarter of a percent of the total US education budget. The USA spends more than a billion dollars on Standardized Testing ALONE! Can you imagine what else we can do with this money, instead of using it on tests that students forget about in a month afterwards anyways? We can help support the fight against ISIS, we can advance our research on Ebola. We could do all sorts of things with the billion dollars we spend EACH year on standardized testing. Contention 5: Just because a test is "fair", does not mean it is "beneficial". A fair test could compose of random questions that anyone could answer, but that doesn't make it "beneficial". This argument is not relevant to this debate Contention 6: My opponent is using statistics to dehumanize students who have suicide. as they say, "On the news, you probably see stories about kids commiting suicide because of standardized testing. Those cases however, are extremely rare. What is common, is self esteem causing confidence. People tend to over exaggerate the small examples of bad things happening but tend to ignore positivity." Basically, what they are trying to say is that it's okay for a small fraction of students to suicide(STUDENTS!) because it helps the majority have confidence, which it doesn't necessarily, as I stated in my attack on their case. I would also like to point out that my opponent does not have any source or quote on this contention, making it a bias and frankly unfair contention. If my opponent were to have this contention standing at the end of the debate, I would like to kindly ask the judges to see that this contention has no warrant and should be ignored.

Title: standardized testing Content: Seeing that I am Pro, the burden to prove the value of standardized testing is on me. I'll begin with a resolution, defintions, and then arguments.Resolved: Standardized testing is a valuable tool in evaluating a student's proficiency in a specific subject.Defintions:Standardized testing: testing that (1) requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or a selection of questions from common bank of questions, in the same way, and that (2) is scored in a “standard” or consistent manner, which makes it possible to compare the relative performance of individual students or groups of students.Valuable: of considerable use, service, or importance.Tool: anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose.Proficiency: the degree of how well-advanced or competent a person is in any subject.Subject: a branch of knowledge as a course of study.Con argues that STs ought to be eliminated from schools outright. I will argue that a) STs are the best type of test that schools and teachers can use for assesment, andb) Non-STs are unfair and unreliable,and thereby they ought to stay in use.1) Standardized tests are more fair than non-standardized tests.A standardized test is the same for everyone. This means that the "playing field," so to speak, is leveled. Students aren't given advantages by getting a easier test, or vice versa. This is widly different from non-standardized tests, where students are given different tests, some are easier, others are much harder. This means that the grades will not be reflective of the actual level of proficency, because the level of difficulty varies. "If Teacher A’s students achieve 1.5 years of growth in a single school year, then we need to know what she is doing and share it with others. If Teacher B’s students down the hall only grow 0.75 years, then he probably needs extra coaching and support. The same with a school or a district; those achieving growth should be celebrated, while those not achieving growth should be supported. Either way, we can only determine objective growth data if tests are standardized (1)."2) Standardized tests are useful tools for teachers.In order for a teacher to teach at his or her best capacity, assesing how well learned his or her students are is critical. "Assessments also give us data to inform instruction. If I teach something, but my class still hasn’t mastered it, then as a teacher I need to examine how I taught it the first time in order to teach it better next time. Likewise, if my class already knows something, I don’t need to teach it to them; we can move on to other things. Maybe most of my class have mastered a skill, but a handful need more time. Either way, I need data to inform my teaching – and that data comes from assessments (1)." As shown before, these assesments must be fair and accurate, otherwise they cannot be relied upon by teachers. Standardized tests can be relied upon, as you can compare scores to others to see how well your students are doing. On the other hand, a non-standardized test cannot be used for this purpose. With this in mind, I'll respond to my opponent's points.A) Taking a test is hard.The purpose of a test is not to be "easy" or "simple," its purpose is to challenge the student to see how much he or she knows. What kind of a fair assesment would it be if we knew everyone would get every answer right because all the questions were so easy that they wouldn't even need to study for it?Also, this point does not apply to only standardized tests. It applies to any type of test. Con is not topical in showing the problems with standardized tests, he is showing a "problem" with tests in general (that they are difficult).B) There should be exceptions for students that feel pressured by having a timed test.Everyone feels pressure when they are timed. I feel pressure when I'm timed, but in order to assure standards, one must accept that we ought to be given the same amount of time to complete the test to make it fair. See above for an explanation on this topic.C) Standardized tests play a role in funding for schools.Yes, yes they do. I'd assume that you are referencing federal funding. In this case, I respond that federal funding only accounts for about 9% of school funds (2). If you are meaning different funding types, please specify.D) There are other ways that you would be able to decide (what classes you want to take).Standardized tests don't influence your class choices. They assess how much you know in a certain subject that you are already taking. I'm unaware of what makes you think that this decides your class scedule. Where did you get this information?That concludes all of Con's unsupported arguments. I'd ask that Con answer two things:a) Are standardized tests the best possible assesment tool for teachers?b) Are standardized tests more fair than subjective ones?I await Con.Sources:(1) http://tnscore.org...(2) http://www.aft.org...

Title: State Standardized Tests Content: I shall rebut Con's criticisms of standardized tests. In so doing, I will provide reasons why standardized test are effectual via my rebuttals. Criticism 1: The tests are not necessary.Rebuttal 1: The tests are necessary. Test results provide a means by which to empirically compare students. Consider a quantitative comparison:“Student A understands 86% of the material; last year, he understood 80%. Student B understands 90% of the material; last year he understood only 65%. Student A has increased his comprehension by 6 percentage points; Student B has increased his understanding by 25 percentage points.” This analysis can guide teachers to help students who are most in need of help. This is better that a qualitative comparison: “Students A and B have improved.” Without a test, there's no way to know which students needs more help. Furthermore, empirical comparisons are useful in the rewarding of academic scholarships and college admission.Criticism 2: Standardized tests do not demonstrate (i.e. prove) anything. Rebuttal 2: Standardized tests demonstrate whether the test taker understands the material covered. In order to do well on an exam, the test taker must possess a sufficient level of understanding in order to pass the test. Otherwise, he will be unable to pass. Guessing is not sufficient. For example, say a student needs to answer at least 70% of the questions correctly on a test in order to pass. Say also that the particular test contains 50 questions, each of which is four-answer multiple choice. Finally, assume that the test contains no “stupid” answers that are obviously false. The probability of answering at least 70% correctly by chance is1 - sum [(50 choose n) * 0.25^n * 0.75^(50-n) from n=0 to n=34] = 0.00000000295194%In other words, it is impossible to do well by chance. The only way to do well is to deliberately select the correct answer. This can be done only if the test taker knows the correct answer. Thus, standardized tests demonstrate that the test taker possesses a sufficient level of understanding. Criticism 3: Creativity and imagination are more important than test-taking.Rebuttal 3: While creativity and imagination are important, it is equally important that students demonstrate an adequate understanding of academic subjects, even if no creativity and imagination are involved. Science and mathematics, for example, are not based upon creativity and imagination. Rather, these fields are based upon a rigorous, procedural application of reason and observation. The only way to check whether a student understands these vital subjects is to ask a relevant question and check to see whether the answer is correct.Creativity is still important. Often, the solution to a mathematical of scientific problem requires creative application of mastered material.Criticism 4: Tests have produced zombies.Rebuttal 4: This is demonstrably false. Some of the most productive, creative members of society are ones who have done well on standardized tests. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, average SAT score between 2090-2340, has produced 24 winners of the Nobel Prize, 44 Rhodes Scholars, 55 Marshall Scholars, and Ben Bernanke. Over 33% of astronauts are alumni of MIT. If MIT were a country, because of its entrepreneurs, the university would rank as the 11th largest in the world by GDP, ahead of Canada, Australia, and South Korea.And that's just one high score school. Schools such as Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Cambridge and Oxford have produced countless scientists, politicians, and artists. These schools all require high performance on standardized tests, yet have not produced zombies. ---Miscellaneous point: A mention of a 19th century Harvard professor.Response: Irrelevant. First, there's no source. Second, so what if some guy said something? If he was right, he was right.--- References:1. Binomial distribution2. http://en.wikipedia.org...3. http://en.wikipedia.org...4. http://www.imf.org...=

Title: Standardized Testing is beneficial for students K-12 in America Content: I believe that Standardized Testing is not beneficial for students K-12 in America. Standardized testing is not beneficial to students. All it does is take away from class time and cause unnecessary stress. Standardized testing does not affect student's grades grades. All it does is provide the state with how much students at different schools are learning. I think that this is an ineffective way of calculating a school's efficiency. The state should look at students' overall grades instead of forcing them to take a long test where their focus is usually lost within the first half hour. Students don't especially care about how well they do on the test, because it won't affect their overall grade. Therefore, a solution would be to (as I said before) use the students' overall grades to calculate data, or make the standardized tests part of their overall grade. Also, it usually takes around a week to take the tests. This time could be spent learning.

Title: Standardized tests ensures students learn essential information. Content: There is some information in the world that is essential to know as a means of communicating effectively and analytically with other individuals in society, whether as a citizen or in the marketplace. Standardized tests help ensure that all students learn this important information. It is true that this information can be cut-and-dry and perhaps even boring, including history, literacy (reading comprehension), and math. Yet, it is, nevertheless, essential, so testing for it and ensuring students know the information is socially and educationally valuable. Yet, it is also true, that this essential information does not constitute all the information that a community may believe their children should know.

Title: No Child Left Behind Act Content: Standardized tests ensures students learn essential information.

Title: Home Schooling Should Be Banned Content: Improves Education

Title: Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to k-12 education in the U.S Content: == Clarification ==The resolution states, "On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States."Let me clarify each of the terms. "On balance" means taking everything into consideration. In such a debate, all harms and benefits are weighed against each other to decide who wins. "Standardized testing" is a form of testing implemented at K-12 education in the United States, where the tests at the K-12 level are the same for all public schools. "Beneficial" means posing a net benefit.The burdens are shared. There's no burden of proof in this debate, only a burden of persuasion, due to the usage of "on balance" and "beneficial," both of which make it a debate of opinions rather than a fact-claim.== Rebuttal ==Pro's case is contradictory. The position of Pro is intended to argue for the resolution. Instead, Pro argues that standardized testing is bad. He's arguing from the wrong side. Pro is arguing that different students require different forms of education, and standardized testing actually fails in doing that. Pro's own source notes that standardized testing is ineffective in doing so. Vote Con right there. Pro's argument is contradictory to itself, and fails to affirm the resolution. Regardless, I'll presume I'm taking the position of Pro and address my opponent's harms:Pro's first harm is that children learn in different ways. But Pro's source, and argument, only address primary school children, which is irrelevant to the resolution. The resolution specifically regards K-12 education, and primary grade students don't link to the resolution. Furthermore, I agree that primary school children learn in different ways - but by K-12, they've all learned and prepared for this. The same set of educational portion would exist anyway, regardless of whether standardized testing exists. As such, the first harm doesn't apply.Pro says standardized testing has been linked to an "overemphasis" on vocational education. I have two responses: (1) overemphasis is subjective, and there's no objective reason to believe "critical thinking in mathematics" is more important than vocational education, and so forth and (2) I don't need to defend the status quo; as long as I can show some form of standardized testing is or would pose a net benefit, I affirm (therefore, you vote Con). This argument is also a bare assertion due to lack of sources. C1) Benefits to studentsPro concedes that testing -- in some form -- is beneficial. Testing allows parents and students to assess themselves. Such an assessment results in increase in total education for the student, and allows parents to stress on further improvement. Herbert J. Walberg (2011) says, “Students benefit directly when they take tests that offer information on how well they have mastered the material intended for learning. School reading and mathematics skills, for example, can be precisely specified, and as students learn the skills, they benefit from ongoing information tailored to their specific, individual progress. Computers streamline this process by providing immediate feedback about correct and incorrect responses far more quickly and with much greater patience than teachers and tutors can provide.” [1]On balance, standardized testing is a helpful form of testing to the student. John Bishop of Cornell University found that standardized testing poses huge educational value to the student. He found that countries requiring students to take nationally standardized tests showed higher test scores on international tests than those who took school-based tests. In another study, he found that US students who anticipated having to pass a standardized test learned more science and math, and were more likely to complete homework and talk with their parents about school work. [2, 3] C2) Teachers see benefit in standardized testsIt's largely agreed that standardized testing benefits teachers as well. According to Laura S. Hamilton and Brian Stecher, “[S]tandardized tests can do many things: tell policymakers and families how well students are doing overall; play a role in state and district accountability systems; contribute to teacher evaluations; and inform decision-making about student course placement. Some tests are used in other ways that include teachers adapting day-to-day instruction to meet individual student needs based on each student's test results.” [4] Teachers generally see standardized tests and associated accountability systems as beneficial. Teachers, therefore, do understand and perceive benefits. For all the above reasons, vote Con. [1] http://www.hoover.org...[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu...[3] http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu...[4] http://www.usnews.com...

Title: Standardized testing is a good thing Content: Hello - and thank for for joining my debate. I will be arguing in support of standardized testing.This is the layout of the debate: 1st round: acceptance // opening statement // opening argument2nd round: counterarguments3rd round: conclusions // final counterargumentsI am looking forward to a pleasent discussion.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1ST ROUND - OPENING ARGUMENT: I will now procede to list reasons why standardized testing is a good - benefitial way of testing:1. Jobs: Even if banned from school systems - to work for certain job forces you need to pass a standardized test to be hired. These include jobs such as: physicians, lawyers, real-estate brokers, and pilots. It would be benifitial in this way to keep standardied testing in our school systems because it will help prepare the youth ahead of time for this test which they might need to take in the future.2. Academic Standards: Standardized tests are also used to see where a student is at academically. The tests help to see if each student meets the common core standards to pass the grade - and understand the cirriculum which they need to know for the future. This is the only way to find out if the youth is truly learning the tools they need to succeed or not.3. Reliability: You might say that people can individually grade the tests what students take and see where they are at there - theit teacher for example. But teachers will sometimes be bias with their grading if they like or do not like a kid. So the only fair way would be for someone to grade the test who does not know the student - or grade them mechanically.4. Authority Approval: A study found that teachers are mostly in support of standardized testing "by an overwhelming two-to-one margin," saying they "improved student attitudes, engagement, and effort." - ProCon.org5. Cheap: Standardized testing is a cheap and affordable way of testing pupils. Standardized tests cost less than 0.1% of K-12 education spending, totaling $5.81 per student per year: "Even if payments were 10 times as large, they would still not be equal to 1 percent of what American jurisdictions spend on education. - ProCon.org6. Student Approval: Students also show a tremendous amount of support for standardized testing. A study found that 79% of students believe test questions are fair on standardized testing. And 71% of students think the amount of tests they need to take is just about right. So with the student's approval and teacher's approval - why change anything at all?7. Parents Approval: 75% of parents are in agreement that standardized testing is a solid and accurate way to see where a student lied academically. While 61% of parents say that the amount of testing their kids go through is a good and fair amount. So if the vast majority of teachers, students, and now parents agree with the testing - why rid of it?8. "Teaching to the test" may be benefitial: This is a quote from the US board of education on teaching to the test and how it may be positive: "if teachers cover subject matter required by the standards and teach it well, then students will master the material on which they will be tested--and probably much more." This quote shows how the US board of education is pointing out that it may be a good thing for teachers to focus on certain - core concepts that pupils need to know.9. Success already made: Lets take China as an example. China is one of the most tested countries in the world - mostly in the standardized format. China is also the 1# country who knows and embraces reading, math, and science.10. Teacher Examination: Standardized testing measures how much of the cirriculum students have learned and have understanded. If a certain class does not do well on the test as a whole - it may be possible that the teacher is not doing their job and the school can look for a replacement. This is a good way to see which teachers are doing the best they can to help their students learn - and which teachers just go for the easy paycheck.Citations: ProCon.org- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Thank you all for your time - and I am looking forward to some passionate debate! ~ Sara

Title: Resolved: Standardized test scores accurately reflect the academic value of students. Content: Pro: Standardized test scores accurately reflect the skills a student possesses. Very nice topic to debate upon. As the pro of Standardized testing, I believe the tests do accurately demonstrate how much a student has learned throughout a certain time period. I will point out my counter arguments in numerical order so that it can be clear towards the voter. 1. Consistency- If a student is knowledgeable of the material being administered in the test, then there is absolutely no reason to have a major difference in scores the first, second, or even third time the test is taken. 2. The "Luck" Factor- There is with no doubt that a student can guess an answer out of four choices when the test administered is a multiple choice test. But let us not forget that out of those four choices there are two wrong answers that the professional test makers create and the other two are very similar to one another. Hence, a student will have to know the material on the test so that he or she can make an educated guess. In regards to free response, a student will have to know the material being tested in order to have high results which makes a Standardized Test completely accurate in determining the academic value of a student. 3. Test Atmosphere: Pressure is just a feeling a student has that arouses from the thought of failing. If a student is well prepared then he or she doesn't feel as much pressure as a student who did not study for an exam. The Set's is without a doubt a test that measures the academic abilities of a student. Many students feel pressure because of the expectations of colleges. Many of these students who feel pressure often do well in tests. The feeling of pressure is easily dealt with if a student is confident and has studied the material that is going to be administered. 4. Standardized Tests are very beneficial towards providing teachers with a student's current level of achievement, testing the students academic value. Stan Jones, states in his article "The Neutralization of Benefits in Standardized Testing", that "They can be used for assessment, the weighing of an individual student's abilities to provide better teaching". If a teacher knows how a student is doing, he or she can help to improve their skills and the standardized tests are accurate in determining a students academic standing. Source Used: http://eserver.org... Best of Luck! Please Vote for the Pro Side of Testing!!!

Title: student ought not be required to take standerdized exit exams to graduate Content: Now without further adieu. .. REBUTTAL: 1) Students should have to prove what they have learned throughout the year. There are several problems with this argument. a) Just because someone passes a test does not prove that they have actually learned anything. They could have cheated on the test; gotten lucky with multiple choice answers; guessed; or memorized the material but not have actually LEARNED the material. b) There are various forms of intelligence and methods of learning. Most standardized tests don't measure improvement, or the overall education one has received. c) Certain students perform better on standardized tests than others. Just because someone might not do well on a standardized test doesn't necessarily mean that they haven't learned the material. d) As you mentioned, teachers may only teach to pass the test. A real life example is attending an SAT course. I took one, and can say for certain that I didn't know what the hell I was talking about when taking the exam. I simply knew how to deduce the right answer on that one particular test - not learn the proper function of what I was being tested on - making your point against this a moot one. 2) People are often tested in the real world. a) My opponent has not proven that people are often tested on standardized tests in the real world. Now, if he wishes to argue that people are tested in general, that is too broad of an argument because I can say that students are tested in general as well. For instance, Con writes, "Not all tests are written on paper, and I believe those are the hardest tests. " This has nothing to do with the contention which discusses standardized tests specifically. b) Con asserts that these standardized tests will benefit the student in the long run. He hasn't provided any arguments or evidence that proves this is the case. ARGUMENTS: 1) First off, my opponent did nothing to back up his values or criterion. He has cited: Independent Rights --> The rights guaranteed to all people by their government or society. Reason --> It guarantees that all people are given the freedom they need in order to be themselves. Teleology --> The end's affect determines whether the means are moral. How has he incorporated these into any of his arguments? I fail to see how universal rights has anything to do with students being forced to take standardized tests. Moreover, my opponent hasn't proven why people need to take these tests to be free. And finally, as I pointed out in my rebuttal, I don't see how "the ends justify the means" in Con's argument considering that Con hasn't shown how these tests actually benefit the student (which was his main argument). 2) Test performance. a) As I said in my rebuttal, not everybody performs well on tests regardless of whether they know the material or not. Some people panic, get sick, choke, etc. These tests are very intimidating to students who sometimes obsess over the results. Therefore one's performance on the rest is really not a very accurate indicator of how each individual performs. b) A lot of students suffer from things like dyslexia or other learning disabilities which inhibit them from performing up to par on the exam. As such, these individuals may never have a fair chance at passing the exam. On the other hand, if they're given an advantage (such as longer time to complete the test), this might not be fair to the other students who are not given more time despite their own personal (sometimes undiagnosed) need. Either way, there's hardly a way to make these exams universally fair for everyone, which goes against your very own value and criterion. 3) Learning Inhibition. a) Preparing for these exit exams usually discourages teachers and school boards from focusing on other aspects of education. There are various types of intelligence, including mathematical intelligence, linguistic intelligence, logical intelligence, creative intelligence, etc. By demanding that these tests be passed in order to graduate, you're promoting only certain aspects of knowledge which is unfair to the students and society as a whole. b) Because people are intelligent in different ways, this test is discriminatory (which again goes against your value) because it discredits those who have intelligence beyond what is examined on the exam. 4) Alternatives. a) Considering your presented values of freedom and equal rights, I posit that if one does not pass a standardized exam, but their grades and class performance show a considerable degree of knowledge in the expected fields, then a system ought to be set up where educators or administrators can offer or allow other ways for the student to demonstrate what they've learned. 5) Usefulness/Uselessness a) Some people need to graduate HS to accomplish goals such as entering the military or other specific fields of training. I posit that some of the knowledge required on the exams will have nothing to do with some individual's direction in life, but because they need to graduate HS in order to tend to their other options, the negation of this resolution stands in their way of success. This again seems to go against Con's value. b) Studies show that those who are required to pass these exit exams do no better in the workforce than those who aren't required to pass these tests. As such, they don't seem to add any relative value to one's life or production in society [1]. c) While standardized tests may be useful in finding out what one knows and does not know (in terms of what they should or are expected to know), this should have nothing to do with whether or not they GRADUATE. Instead, they can be tools or guides used to determine which areas a pupil may need more help or focus in. The graduation aspect is also supported by the reality that different schools in different towns and states require different things to pass. Not all standardized tests are the same, and as such a student from a different school may also have an unfair advantage. This again does not seem to uphold Con's value. 6) Costs a) Creating the tests, preparing for the tests, giving the tests and grading the tests all cost money. Because Con has not proven that these tests are necessary OR beneficial (or even reliable or relevant), then this cost is unnecessary and therefore his criterion of the ends justifying the means does not apply. Source: [1] . http://hsee.umn.edu...

Title: Education: Testing Content: Standardized testing is a efficient strategy that improves the work, effort, and dedication teachers put into their job. "Education researchers gauge the quality of an individual teacher by looking at student test scores. If scores go up in a teacher's classroom, that's a sign the teacher is doing a good job" (1). This is, and has always been, a just way to measure teachers' ability to build their students knowledge. In addition, most teachers and administrators approve, even, of these standardized tests, "Minnesota teachers and administrators interviewed for a study in the Oct. 28, 2005, issue of the peer-reviewed Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA) approved of standardized tests 'by an overwhelming two-to-one margin,' saying they 'improved student attitudes, engagement, and effort.' An oft-cited Arizona State University study in EPAA's Mar. 28, 2002 edition, concluding that testing has little educational merit, has been discredited by educational researchers for poor methodology, and was criticized for wrongly blaming the tests themselves for stagnant test scores, rather than the shortcomings of teachers and schools" (2). Not only does the government believe that standardized test are a quality way of judging teachers based off their students' work, but the majority of teachers do as well.

Title: Resolved on balance Content: I accept. I expect that I am allowed to present definitions because of the absence of an outline to the argument. The BoP is on con. [1]Beneficial: receiving or entitling one to receive advantage, use, or benefit [2]Balance: a state of equilibrium or equipoise [3]Standardized tests: any form of test that requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or a selection of questions from common bank of questions, in the same way, and that is scored in a "standard" or consistent manner, which makes it possible to compare the relative performance of individual students or groups of students. Contention 1: Testing is provably beneficial to all students. Contention 2: Standardized tests are normal tests. Contention 3: Tests help teachers recognize where students need help with learning. C1: A test is a a procedure intended to establish the quality, performance, or reliability of something[4]. By taking a test, a student is able to see how well they know a subject. These tests can help the student assess what they need to study. This is beneficial to the student in the case where they may not know what all they do not understand, which is where a standardized test can help them. C2: A standardized test is not just the tests that you take once a year that are sent in to assess your overall knowledge, they are also, by definition, the tests you take ever so often in all of your classes. A standardized test is just a fancy way of describing a test that everyone in a class takes, whether it be 'multiple choice' or 'true or false'. C3: By taking a test, not only does the student help themselves find out what they need to learn and study, it also allows the teacher to be aware of what their students are learning, and what they are having a hard time with. Whether the teacher decides to help out individuals or their class as a whole, this can be equally efficient in addressing these types of issues. Conclusion: I have upheld my value of the beneficialness of standardized tests, that standardized testing is beneficial to k-12 education in the United States, and I urge the affirmation of the resolution. Sources: [1]http://www.merriam-webster.com... [2]http://dictionary.reference.com... [3]http://edglossary.org... [4]http://www.merriam-webster.com...

Title: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States Content: By accepting this match, you agree to follow the process below: Round 1: Present Debate Cases Round 2: Recognize and attach opponent's arguments Round 3: Defend your case Round 4: Voters(Why you win) My partner and I negate today"s resolution and stand resolved, On balance, standardized testing is NOT beneficial to K-12 education in the United States. Obs 1: Even though the SAT and ACT are considered "Standardized Tests", not all students take them, so the Con will ignore any arguments made about them. Obs 2: If the Con can prove that there are more harms than benefits, it should be enough for the Con to win. Contention 1: Standardized Testing results in incomplete education A: Standardized testing alters school curriculum to the detriment of a well-rounded education Lisa Adams, Research Associate, Joseph Pedulla, Professor at Boston College, George Madaus, Professor at Boston College, 2003, Theory into practice, 42.1, p. 18-29 Quote "Much of the research on state testing programs addresses their effects on what is taught. A common finding is that teachers report giving greater attention to tested content areas. For example, of the Virginia survey by Myran & Workman(1999), more than 80% indicated that the state Standards of Learning (SOL) test had impacted their instruction, particularly with regard to the content focus of daily lessons. " B: Low-income and minority students are hurt the most by the emphasis on standardized test scores. "How Standardized Testing Damages Education (Updated July 2012). " FairTest. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, 28 Aug. 2007. Web. 03 Nov. 2015. <. http://fairtest.org...;. Quote"Students from low-income and minority-group backgrounds, English language learners, and students with disabilities, are more likely to be denied diplomas, retained in grade, placed in a lower track, or unnecessarily put in education programs. This ensures they will fall further and further behind their peers. Many drop out, some ending up in the "school-to-prison pipeline. " On the other hand, children from white, middle and upper income backgrounds are more likely to be placed in "gifted and talented" or college preparatory programs where they are challenged to read, explore, investigate, think and progress rapidly. "-Champ Briefs Pg. 147 MPK: Standardized testing can harm the well-rounded education curriculum teachers have been teaching. Standardized testing also hurts low-income and minority-group backgrounds and discriminates against them, creating even greater achievement gaps. Contention 2: Because of the limitations of standardized testing, it makes a poor measurement of actual learning. A: One size fits all just doesn"t work W. James Popham, Emeritus Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Why Standardized Tests Don't Measure Educational Quality. March 1999 | Volume 56 | Number 6 Using Standards and Assessments Pages 8-15. . http://www.ascd.org...'t-Measure-Educational-Quality.aspx Quote"At a very general level, the goals that educators pursue in different settings are reasonably similar. For instance, you can be sure that all schools will give attention to language arts, mathematics, and so on. But that's at a general level. At the level where it really makes a difference to instruction, in the classroom, there are significant differences in the educational objectives being sought. And that presents a problem to those who must sell standardized achievement tests. " B. Tests do not cover what is actually taught. James Popham continues. Quote"To illustrate the seriousness of the mismatch that can occur between what's taught locally and what's tested through standardized achievement tests, educators ought to know about an important study at Michigan State University reported in 1983 by Freeman. They concluded that between 50 and 80 percent of what was measured on the tests was not suitably addressed in the textbooks. The proportion of topics presented on a standardized test that received more than cursory treatment in each textbook was never higher than 50 percent. " MPK: Standardized testing does not cover much of what is taught by teachers, and are too limited. Therefore, such tests cannot accurately measure actual learning by students Contention 3: Standardized testing hurts teachers A:Teachers lose control of the curriculum. Segall, Avner. [Professor at Michigan State University]. "Teachers" Perceptions of the Impact of State-Mandated Standardized Testing: The Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) as a Case Study of Consequences. " Theory & Research in Social Education. 2003. Web. Accessed November 4, 2015. Quote "Exploring the relationship between teachers and standardized testing, and using the Michigan Evaluation Assessment Program (MEAP) and the discourses surrounding it as a case study of consequences, this study both combines findings from previous studies on teachers and testing and adds to them. Like McNeil"s (2000) study, it points out how standardized testing is not simply an evaluator of a curriculum but its creator. " B: Teachers lose control of both content and scope "How Standardized Tests Shape--and Limit--Student Learning. " National Council of Teachers of English. James R. Squire Office of Policy Research. 2014. Web. Accessed 8 November 2015. . http://www.ncte.org...- nov2014/CC0242PolicyStandardized. pdf Quote"Standardized tests narrow the entire curriculum in many schools, often squeezing out subjects such as music, art, foreign languages, and, especially in elementary grades, social studies, because they are not included in tests. For ELA teachers, these tests also lead to subject-specific narrowing. ELA teachers are required to focus their instruction on the literacy skills measured on standardized tests. Since reading is more prominent than writing in most tests, teachers spend more time on reading rather than writing, usually focusing on comprehension, not higher-order critical reading skills. " MPK: Standardized testing forces teachers to teach to a test instead of being allowed to facilitate learning in their preferred ways. This leads to teachers feeling inadequate and struggling to teach a curriculum they didn"t create. Conclusion: As my partner and I have proven, standardized testing is NOT beneficial to K-12 education. Standardized testing hurts minorities and low income students, and it does not cover what is taught, which causes teaching to the test.

Title: Standardized tests are the best way for colleges to decide on potential students. Content: Resolution Negated: That standardized tests are the best way for universities to discern potential students. Examination of the Resolution: One concern I have with the resolution is whether it is meant to imply it is the best way to determine which students to accept or which applications to consider. This does not make much of a difference either way, but it is worthy of consideration. I chose to remove the stipulation "such as the ACT and SAT" because there are many other tests (AP, CLEP, SAT II) and if my opponent wishes to bring those up I would be willing to address them. Introduction: To start off, I do not believe that standardized tests are necessarily a bad way of rating students, only that they are not the best. Though I believe there I benefits, I will leave those too my opponent. I will focus my the first part of my argument on the flaws of standardized tests and the second part on the merits of other selection factors. C1: These tests show no favoritism and are the same for every tester on the same day. If by this my opponent means to imply that tests is objective, than it is a fair point of view. However, score trends indicate that not everyone scores equally well on standardized tests across demographics (1). Females, Hispanics, and African Americans all score lower on average on the SAT then white males. However, this discrepancy is not reflected in college grades. Female college freshman actually have higher GPA's than their male peers, on average. Considering the fact that the test is meant to test aptitude for college-level study, this is a significant problem. C2: These tests are very practical and cheap. The tests may be cheap to administer, but they are not cheap for students. The SAT test costs $45, and it is more if the student is from a country besides the US, registers late, or wants a detailed score report (1). A student's GPA costs them nothing to acquire and regards of its administrative costs, it must be computed for class rank and graduation purposes anyway. I now offer a few objections to standardized tests: C3: They provide an advantage to those with more money. There are two main reasons why the wealthy benefit from standardized tests. One is that they can afford to pay for books and other study aids that poor students cannot afford. Personally, I improved my SAT score by around 200 points by studying out of a book. Granted, it wasn't that expensive and I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but for those who are struggling to pay the bills it simply isn't an option. For those that have a great deal of money to spend, special study courses for different tests are available and they certainly seem to work. The second reason why it is beneficial to those with more money is that they can afford to take the test more times. Universities only consider a student's best scores (rightfully so) which results in many taking the tests many times. It is easy for those with more money to afford to take the test more times. C4: Standardized tests encourage poor work Standardized tests have timed segments that are far too short for effective work. The math sections of the ACT and SAT are more focused on answering many simply questions quickly than answering harder questions correctly. On the SAT, students are given 25 minutes for 20 math questions in the 2nd section. Needless to say, not many of these questions are extremely hard and students don't have time to check their work thoroughly for accuracy. The essay section is another area where this problem is most evident (2). An MIT professor found that longer essays were consistently awarded higher scores, regardless of content. He claimed it was possible to predict the grade of the essay based solely on length. The time to write the essay is only 25 minutes. The idea of writing a serious essay at a university in 25 minutes is preposterous, the essay simply encourages the students to write as much as possible in a short time. Now, here are some other factors that university admissions officials ought to consider to be as important or more important than standardized tests: C5: Admissions Essays Admissions essays give a fuller understanding of the students' intellectual capabilities by showing what their work is like when they are able to put a great deal of time and effort into it. They also give a more personal understanding of a student that allows admissions officials to gain a fuller understanding of who the student is and how well they might fit in and contribute to the community. Some universities that focus on mathematics and science, including the prestigious California Institute of Technology, put a higher focus on test scores then essays because they believe it to be a better way of gauging competence in these fields. To some extent they may be right, but college essays are becoming more open ended and provide more opportunities for students to write about their aptitude in more technical fields. To many Liberal Arts colleges, this is not even a concern. C6: Grade Point Average One of the main criticism of GPA is that it does not always reward intelligence. However, a good work ethic is just as important as intellect in a challenging college environment and they should be considered equally at the very least. Also, maintaining a high GPA requires regular high test scores in class and not one high quality performance on a single day. It can therefore be considered a better measure of long term success. Colleges look at GPA in comparison to other students at the same school, so if a teacher was unfair and awarded no A's, a student would not be penalized for a B+. Conclusion: Though standardized tests are a useful way to determine what students are good candidates for a university, they suffer from many flaws. There are other aspects of a students application that ought to be considered at least equal to standardized tests, if not more important. Sources: (1) http://www.fairtest.org... (2) http://www.nytimes.com...

Title: National testing will ensure all students learn the same, essential skills and information Content: Standardized tests ensures students learn the most important information. There is some information in the world that is essential to know so that, as adults, schoolchildren can excel in their jobs. Standardized tests help ensure that all students learn this important information. It is true that this information can be difficult, and perhaps even boring, including history, literacy (reading comprehension), and math. Yet, it is, nevertheless, essential, so testing for it and ensuring students know the information is extremely valuable. A recent study of American high school seniors found that just 13 per cent could answer basic questions of American history correctly; national testing ensures that the next generation will be encouraged to learn about such history, in a fair and balanced manner, up and down the country1. 1 Banchero, S. (2011, June 15). Students stumble again on the basics of history. Retrieved July 12, 2011, from The Wall Street Journal: improve this

Title: standardized testing should be eliminated Content: Positive Aspects of Standardized Testing 1) Standardized testing gives teachers direction to help them conclude what to teach students and when to teach it. The outcome is more efficient instructional time and a simplified way of timeline management. 2) Standardized testing tells parents and the school how well students are faring across the country and locally. This can also indicate how your local area is doing compared against the national landscape. You need standardized testing to see where the problems are. Without the level knowledge that it gives, certain problems won't be recognized and dealt with. 3) Since all students in a school are doing identical tests, standardized tests provide an accurate comparison across groups. Over the years great improvements have been made with regards to test bias, which has led to more accurate assessments and comparisons. 4) Standardized testing permits students' progress to be tracked over the years. When students take the same type of test yearly, which is adjusted for grade level, it is easy to see if a student is improving, degrading, or not changing. This assesses the teacher and the child. 5) It improves the accountability of students and schools and motivates students to learn the material. Knowledge is cumulative, so a student doing poor early can end up behind indefinitely. 6) It costs 50 cents to $5 to score an essay, compared with pennies for each multiple-choice question. According to the new York times. Standardized testing simply makes education more stable, level, cheap, adaptable, and allows for better assessment.

Title: Standardized testing Content: I have two main arguments for Standardized Testing: 1. K-12 schooling only exists to prepare you for your life after you graduate, whether that be college, military, joining the workforce, etc. Standardized tests only really matter if you plan to go to college. If you intend to go to college but are against tests, you are sorely misguided as to what goes on in a college setting. Standardized tests prepare students for what is going to happen in college, as well as in most jobs where you will have to complete tasks under a deadline. It is true that school should be a place that values learning and creativity over preparation for the real world, but that is not what we are debating here and therefore is non-topical. If school actually was a place where students were encouraged to learn whatever they desired, then yes, standardized testing would not fit that model. But that is not the reality, and standardized tests fit in with the current schooling system. 2. Standardized testing provides a benchmark to measure students off of. There are numerous nationwide tests within the United States alone, as well as tests that are taken internationally. These tests give us valuable information on the next generation's competence in fields such as reading, writing, and math. While it is true that there are many ways to measure intelligence and that there are plenty of people who are intelligent but do not test well, the majority must be considered over the outliers to give us more accurate data. On top of all that, the fact of the matter is that many other ways of "measuring" intelligence are extremely subjective. To give a hypothetical example, if someone is a talented artist and does incredible progressive art in a style no one has ever seen before, they may still be shunned by those who do not enjoy it. Standardized tests only use certain subjects for a reason; those subjects are not subjective and can be easily measured. There is a right and a wrong answer. Art and Music are certainly things that you can be accomplished in, but they will never be things that can be used to measure a student's intelligence. In regards to the stress argument my opponent presents, welcome to the real world. Students who "give up because they know they are going to fail" will not survive in a high intensity work scenario anyways. Students that do good on homework and schoolwork but bomb test after test are in the overwhelming minority. 99% of the time, if you study for a standardized test and actually want to pass it, you will. The issues presented are only present in small amounts, and standardized testing benefits the students in the long run, as well as our society as a whole by providing relevant information of the intelligence of our youth.

Title: Standardized testing accuaretly represents a student's academic ability. Content: Thank you for the response. My opponent said that pressure actually helps children to learn and become more prepared for future work places, this may be true but is irrelevant. The resulution says: Standardized testing accuaretly represents a student's academic ability. So the fact that pressure produced by these tests can help prepare one for a future career is irrelevant becuase it does not prove that these tests appropriately represent a student's academic ability. My opponent also said that he agreed that debate was an academic pursuit and was not on the test. I agree that english,history, and writting skills can compliment one's debating. However, that does not mean that these things are equivellant to it. Once again I thank my opponent for allowing me to test this resolution. I don't know if I already said this but I will be debating this in a few months, so all feedback is appreciated! I strongly urge a CON ballot.

Title: Standardized testing should remain in our schools. Content: Alright, let's go.I am assuming when you talk of "our schools" you mean US schools, correct?Therefore I will be basing my argumentation on the US school system.Sadly, Standardized testing is one of the cornerstones of present day US schooling. Administered generally by the state, such as the Regents examinations in NY, they are a overall assessment of a subject such as chemistry. Most states have these, or comparable, examinations, which nearly always have a direct impact on the students grade. This already creates a problem due to these reasons. The test is a one time assessment, and doesn't consider a plethora of factors that could negatively impact the score such as anxiety. Also, due for it being a one time assessment, individual growth is not considered. A teacher may have helped a student grow tremendously over the year, but the student still fails to score proficient. Adequate yearly progress (http://teaching.about.com...) which is part of the No child Left Behind project, focuses soly on that one grade. This creates a further problem, since if schools perform badly on standardized tests, the No child Left Behind project can oversee that particular school, and leave little control in the schools hands. Due to the test having a major impact on the students grade, teachers are pressured to teach to the test, under a strict curriculum that doesn't allow room for creativity on the teachers and the students part. Since the Standardized tests determine much of a students school life, several other problems arise. Minority's are at a disadvantage, since they often have inadequate educations. When they score low on standardized tests, they are placed into Special Ed programs, which they rarely can grow out of. So the standardized tests cause minority's to have less chances to progress in school, or even get admitted to certain schools (http://www.naacpldf.org...) Furthermore, Standardized tests are not an accurate examination of a students skill level. A recent study showed that colleges barred students from attending their college if they had a SAT score of under 700, stating that these students would not be able to complete college work. But on the contrary, of these students 86% actually exxeled at their college freshmens year work. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said “State assessments in mathematics and English often fail to capture the full spectrum of what students know and can do. Students, parents, and educators know there is much more to a sound education than picking the right answer on a multiple-choice question.” But by the virtue of standardized tests, they are often Multiple choice So when even the Secretary of Education admits state assements are not working, clearly something is wrong, and standardized tests have to be lessened, ore even completely removed.

Title: School Testing Content: Standardized testing costs 1.7 billion per year, this would save taxpayers a lot of money ending the madness. These tests are unreliable when measuring a student's performance. In 2011, a study found that testing does not improve student achievement. The United States has dropped in Math, Reading, and Science. The testing only measures a small portion of education. Teachers are in classes teaching a test as opposed to teaching from a book. This is only hurting education, the teachers and students should not be held accountable for poor test grades. Not all students test the same, some students test poorly, but at the same time know more than they are showing on the test. These tests do not bring a positive learning environment for the student or for the teacher, both of which are stressed. The student is stressed fearing they may not pass and can not move up to the next grade. The teacher may lose their job if some of the students do not pass this test. Testing is good to see what level students are at and what the school or teacher need to work on, but it should not be a deciding factor on anything. http://www.nap.edu... http://www.science20.com...

Title: standardized testing should be eliminated Content: I will begin by refuting my opponent's claims, and then I will move on and create my own arguments supporting the elimination of standardized testing. ======== REBUTTALS ======== "1) Standardized testing gives teachers direction to help them conclude what to teach students and when to teach it." All schools have curricula that is already predetermined by the nature of the course which they are teaching. Standardized testing is not needed to give these teachers a direction. If anything, standardized testing negatively impacts education in this way, since it results in what as known as "teaching to the test" where teachers do not care about truly educating the students, rather, they want to see positive results when it comes to test day. For a dramatic example of teaching to the test, we have to look no further than a teacher in Texas whose school, in some classrooms, stopped teaching social studies and the sciences completely since these were not on the state test [1]. Is this the education that these children deserve? "2) Standardized testing tells parents and the school how well students are faring across the country and locally." Standardized tests are extremely inaccurate at gauging the capabilities of students, and thus cannot be used in this way. This is because it is impossible to create a test that is fair to all students, and thus it creates an inaccurate representation of both those that benefit and are hurt by this inherent bias. These standardized tests also cannot account for other factors critical to learning such as motivation that are key to success. "3) Since all students in a school are doing identical tests, standardized tests provide an accurate comparison across groups." Much standardized testing, unfortunately, leads to cheating due to a pressure to obtain high standardized test scores by the students or teachers [2]. Also, to attempt to alleviate this cheating, many standardized tests have created multiple forms so that it becomes much more difficult for teachers to cheat and nigh on impossible for students. However, these again have the inaccuracies that inherently result from differences in the tests. "4) Standardized testing permits students' progress to be tracked over the years." The performance of students on any given day should obviously not be used to establish whether or not they have made progress throughout the entire year. "5) It improves the accountability of students and schools and motivates students to learn the material." While it may motivate students to memorize answers that will likely show up on the test, if anything, it discourages students from learning a wider range of material as sourced above, since the rest of their knowledge will not determine their results on the standardized tests. "6) It costs 50 cents to $5 to score an essay, compared with pennies for each multiple-choice question." Is this an assumption that standardized tests only consist of multiple-choice questions? Many, like the SAT and PSSA do not, but under the assumption that they do, this only further encourages students to memorize concepts without learning the material. This is why many very important tests like AP Exams include free-response portions, because they are one of the most effective ways in analyzing the true knowledge of a student, as far as tests are concerned, which vastly outweighs the cost issues (which have not been shown by my opponent to be vast). =========== CONSTRUCTIVE =========== I propose that standardized tests be abolished in favor of what is known as the portfolio method. This method essentially consists of creating a file for each student and placing assignments and works of students frequently in this file. There are many benefits of this system [3]. 1) It is cheap. The amount of money that it costs to purchase some filing cabinets and folders for portfolios is minimal, and it can even be put online to further save money. 2) It is much more accurate. Instead of measuring student performance on a single day, and expecting this to account for the student's progress throughout the entire year, performance is measured constantly, which reduces stress and is inherently more accurate. 3) It encourages teaching a wider curriculum. With results based on a variety of tests and assignments given throughout the course, teachers focus on teaching the material on a chapter-by-chapter basis, instead of spending the entire course looking ahead to the standardized tests. This ensures that everything that needs to be taught for a complete understanding of the subject is taught. Since the portfolio method is much more beneficial than standardized testing, I therefore affirm that standardized testing should be eliminated. Sources: [1] http://www.www2.districtadministration.com... [2] http://www.cbsnews.com... [3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com... I look forward to my opponent's response and hope that this will be an enjoyable debate.

Title: Standardized testing should remain in our schools. Content: Okay let's wrap thing up here on both of our sides. Overall, having standardized testing in our school systems are more beneficial than bad. Let's recap, the cost is low, it prepares students for higher level testing, helps school systems need to see where they need to teach more of, helps compare different school's grades, sees where each student is at individually, and does help prepare the students for some jobs later on. My question to you is, "If standardized testing is mostly beneficial, then why should it be banned?" Other than that, that wraps up my part of this debate and I am looking forward to your argument as well. (It was very nice debating with you, in fact, I am having this debate for real at my middle school tommorow, so thanks for helping me prepare :)

Title: Standardized Testing...the person with the dumbest/craziest points wins Content: STANDARDIZED TESTING IS A BEAUTIFUL THING. WITHOUT IT, KIDS WOULD BECOME DUMB, AND DUMB PEOPLE ARE LESS KNOWLEDGEABLE OF THE THINGS THAT HARM THE EARTH AND ARE MORE LIKELY TO PRACTICE THESE THINGS, LIKE LITTERING. WITHOUT STANDARDIZED TESTING, DUMBNESS WILL DESTROY THE EARTH WHICH IS PART OF THE UNIVERSE. THUS DESTROYING STANDARDIZED TESTING DESTROYS THE UNIVERSE!!!THANK Y'ALL FOR YOUR TIME!!! BACK TO CON! >:P

Title: Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States Content: On the mark: is standardized testing good for education? Hoffman 99, Today's Parents Something has changed. For years we were content to sail along, secure in the belief that Canada had one of the world's best education systems. We looked around at our literate, economically successful democracy and thought, "We must be doing a good job of educating." But, at some point, that belief began to crumble. Maybe it was a reaction to more holistic education approaches introduced in the 1960s, and a growing perception that our schools turn out graduates who lack basic skills. Maybe it's because the most educated adult population in history has higher expectations of schools. Perhaps it's our shrinking global society. We know much more than we used to about what Japanese, German and American children learn in school. Do they learn times tables a grade earlier than our kids? Will that make them better software designers and widget-makers as adults?Whatever the reason, we increasingly look to Standardized tests to see if our schools measure up -- seven of ten Canadian provinces, as well as the Yukon Territory, now have some form of regular testing , usually beginning in grade three or four. Greg Gribbon of Bradford, Ontario welcomes this trend. He wants testing to confirm what his six- and eight-year-old daughters are learning and to tell him whether the school is doing its job. For Gribbon, report cards and classroom marks aren't enough. "I've heard too many stories from parents who were told that their child was doing fine, only to find out in grade three and grade four that he couldn't read."So, what's a good test? "It must have both validity and reliability," says David Ireland, a retired manager of research and evaluation for the former Carleton Board of Education in eastern Ontario. Validity means the test measures what you want it to measure -- for example, basic math skills. Reliability means that the same child would get the same result from one week to the next, no matter who was doing the marking.Get Congress out of standardized testing Tribune 11 Standardized testing is good for assessing the progress of a child's education and determining where to go next. That is, if the test is a diagnosis-type test. However, standardized testing -- the types done to comply with NCLB -- is seriously flawed. These tests aim to determine how a classroom, a school or a district stands in educating children. They are flawed partially because they encourage schools to teach to the test and partially because they fail to consider the contribution parents make or, more pointedly, fail to make. Teaching to the test only builds memorization skills, rather than understanding context, opinions and social aspects.Data gathered from the survey reveal important information about the impact of testing. Klein Zevenbergen Brown 06 Klein, School of Education Zevenbergen, Department of Psychology Brown,Student Personnel Administrator This paper explores how teachers manage standardized testing in schools. A survey was distributed among 20 elementary, middle, and high school teachers in a semi-rural community of Western New York. The data gathered from the survey responses reveal important information about the impact of testing on teaching. Standardized testing affects many of the teachers' focus on instruction. In many cases, teachers prepare their students year-round. Teachers provide test-related, preparative instruction, which governs most of their curricula. A few teachers admit that testing allows them to develop more focused teaching experiences for their students. Insights gleaned from this research study reveal the need to address the many challenges teachers encounter related to standardized testing.

Title: on balance standardized testing is benifical for k-12 education Content: Welcome to debate. org, an open debating community for all. Framework: According to google, "is" in the context of the resolution means "third person singular present of be". This impies present tense only, Therefore, as the Con, all I have to do is to prove that the status quo is not beneficial. I do not have to argue about POTENTIAL benefits of standardized testing; just the actual real world effect. If I show a detrimental effect, I ought to win the round. I do not have to advocate for NO testing, I can argue for reform. Contention 1: Exclusion A. Standardized testing excludes students with disablilities . http://web.a.ebscohost.com... Eric Badtscher-Senior Technical Writer writes that Standardized testing fails to account that not all children learn in the same manner. Also, Standardized tests exclude students who are bad at test taking from receiving higher education B. Classism and For-Profit Testing Standardized testing creates a profit motive behind testing instead of a learning motive, According to Broussard, Data Professor at NYU "14. . http://www.theatlantic.com... He writes that "standardized tests are not based on general knowledge. .. they are based on specific knowledge contained in specific sets of books: the textbooks created by the test makers. " Therefore, because private companies create these tests, they contain the specific information solely in the textbook, forcing schools to rely on textbooks created by the company itself. However, since poor schools cannot afford some of these books or at least not in sufficient quantity, poor students and schools do worse under testing regimes. . http://www.omegalearning.com... According to By David Miller Sadker, PhD, data confirms that poor students, especially minorities, fail standardized tests far more often. "Even moderate income differences could result in major test score differences. In Ohio, almost half of the students from families with incomes below $20,000 failed the state exams, while almost 80 percent of students from families earning more than $30,000 passed those same exams. " This is unfair to poorer schools because they cannot afford these books and the students don"t know what to expect for the test and therefore don"t perform as well. Because these students cannot pass, this directly increases the dropout rate. C: Cheating The high stakes of these tests incentivizes large amounts of students and even administration to cheat on exams. This nullifies my opponents argument that the data is good. The data is flawed because it is tampered with and inaccurate . . http://www.scpr.org... The National Center for Fair & Open Testing found cases of cheating on standardized tests in 37 states across the country. Cheating occurred in 197 districts in the past year alone. Contention 2: Dropout rate. The goal of education is to increase the life skills of students in order to prepare them for the real world. However, standardized testing is detrimental to that by increasing dropout rates. According to Advancement Project "10 . http://fairtest.org... "From 1996 until 2002 (when NCLB became law), 68 of the 100 largest urban districts had rising graduation rates. Twenty-four of them achieved double-digit increases in their graduation rates, while only four had double-digit drops during that period. From 2002 until 2006, however, 73 of the 100 largest districts experienced declining graduation rates. Seventeen experienced at least a double-digit drop in their graduation rates. " . http://www.educationworld.com... Now my opponent may claim this is only a correlation, but 28 states require students to pass a standardized test in order to pass high school. If they cannot pass than they are forced to drop out. . https://b.3cdn.net... The Advancement project also talks about how testing increases incentivization to kick out failing students. If students consistently do badly on exams than teachers have an incentive to kick them out in order to raise the average score. The Impact of dropouts is very large. . http://www.slj.com... School Library Journal reports that dropouts are 8 times more likely to be arrested. . http://lifescapesolutions.com... . http://www.statisticbrain.com... According to multiple sources dropouts commit 75% of crime. This impact is the largest in the round, as if education makes people criminals than it fails to do its job Conclusion Vote Con based off my impacts. Spelling should go Con as Pro misspelled beneficial. Thanks for the very short round

Title: Re-entrenches disadvantage Content: As the data obtained about tests is over ten years old and tests have been reformatted and improved, the statistics may not be wholly accurate. The resolution does not give specific standards for the test. We could choose to improve the quality of the tests by including styles suited to a broader spectrum of people (multiple choice or short answer sections as well as essay or analysis sections). It is not having standardized tests alone that is discriminating against minorities, but it is the way the tests are created. Minorities are given the same public school opportunities as majorities, so they should be tested like everyone else. We should focus our efforts on assisting them to reach the necessary level rather than eliminate all testing. In 1999, Montgomery County, Maryland, discovered the way to eliminate effects of biased testing. ". . .closing the gaps in test performance is the best way to quell the argument over the place and purpose of standardized testing" [[Meserve, Jeanne. "Standardized Tests under Fire." CNN. June 15, 1999. 24 Sept., 2009. http://www.cnn.com/US/9906/15/standardized.tests/%5D%5D

Title: Standardized Testing is beneficial for students K-12 in America Content: Standardized Testing is beneficial for students K-12 in America. Framework: Cost benefit analysis. This means the side with the most amount of benefits (aff) or harms (neg) of standardized testing should win this debate. Observation: The neg has the burden to provide alternative assessments that provide credible evidence. Rules: No negative comments!

Title: National, standardized tests are a poor measure of student learning Content: Standardized testing is not perfect, but it helps to sets useful standards that help student learning. It is important that a nation has a general frame of reference on where students should, on average, be at various stages in their education. Standardized testing helps do this by setting a baseline level of achievement at each grade, where the average student is expected to be. While some students may perform above or below this standard, the important thing is judging the general educational trends across society, so that governments can help guide their national educational system onto a globally competitive path. improve this

Title: High school students in the US ought to be required to pass standardized exit exams to graduate Content: While I think it is unfortunate that some teachers ony "teach" for the test, that doesn't mean the test is faulty.......it means the teacher is. Standardized tests are great because if you take human scoring out of the question the results are easy to assess and document. However, if a test has essay questions or something other than multiple choice or true/false answering you have to have humans score the results. If computer scoring is used the results are very clear. These tests are also economical to make, give and score. Another advantage is that while scoring of the individual may not be completely perfect ,it does give a good indicator of the school or class average. This helps school administrators know better what is working and what isn't within their curriculum framework. You say in your argument that "students from across the United States are all taught different subject matters and skills." My point is that there should be BASICS that are enforced and proficiency in them realized before graduation. The idea of standardized testing is to remove subjective factors from assessment. As a result, standardized tests provide several advantages to admissions committees and others who need to evaluate and compare the people who take these tests. You say that standardized tests are not important in the college admission process. I beg to differ. The SATs and ACTs are not optional for universities. There is a range that they expect. Excellent grades and poor scores will not secure admission. I am not stating that great standardized test scores and poor grades will.The standardization of these tests ensures that test-takers are being measured objectively on the same material. The grading is standardized, so test scores are the same no matter who or what is scoring them. This removes any bias that might stem from the scorer. On the other hand, tests that use subjective grading might yield scores that vary widely depending on who is scoring them. Standardized tests supposedly predict how well students will perform in the schools to which they're applying. For instance, the MCAT is designed to test the skills necessary to perform well in medical school. While a good MCAT score doesn't necessarily guarantee a successful medical school experience, studies have shown that standardized tests predict success more accurately than more subjective assessments, such as interviews. In fact, interviews have been shown to have only as much accuracy as chance in predicting a student's success at a particular school. Another advantage of standardized testing is that the results can be generalized and repeated, which shows a degree of validity and reliability. An additional benefit stems from aggregation, which provides a more accurate assessment of a particular group's skills and knowledge. One individual test-taker's score may not indicate how well the test measures the body of knowledge it's designed for. However, enough people take these tests so that their aggregate scores can provide useful information, because the percentage of assessment error decreases as the sample size increases. While many people criticize standardized tests as creating a bias along a number of factors, the tests nonetheless provide a more standardized tool in comparing test-takers than many other elements that admissions committees consider when evaluating applicants.

Title: Resolved: An ideal form of No Child Left Behind would be beneficial to the welfare of the USA Content: Well, to conclude my argument being my opponent forfeited the last round: ===CONCLUSION:=== 1) The standardized testing system does not cater for students of extremely high or low intellect. 2) The emphasis on Maths, English and Science is problematic, as it narrow3s the course away from subjects like Art and Woodwork, which are hard to standardize. 3) Failing schools often require funds to come to a sustainable level. If they are deprived of these funds, they fail and the cost of building new schools is far greater than upgrading the existing one. This drain in funds can indeed reduce welfare. 4) Standardized testing is racially biased towards Caucasians. [Source:http://www.raceandhistory.com......] I would like to thank my opponent for the debate, and judges and members for reading. Thank you.

Title: Standardized Tests Content: Standardized tests are not an effective method to determine a student's academic success. Standardized tests simplify the learning process to multiple choice answers and discourage students to think outside of the box. Students, especially those of a young age deal with a great amount of stress from test taking because they become nervous and overwhelmed with not only the testing process but the studying beforehand. Instead of enjoying school they are losing sight of the most important part of education: learning. Students are indeed learning which answers are "correct" or "incorrect" by multiple choice. Yet, isn't it most important that students are learning to understand why these answers are correct or incorrect? Don't we want our children to question and understand the information they are being taught as well as the world around them? Is that not the purpose of education in the first place? Consider the troubles these students are encountering when dealing with standardized tests and how this affects the learning process.

Title: Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States Content: Essentially, your article covers both the pro and the con. Standardized test promote teaching a test rather than teaching critical thinking. On one hand you have a student who can pass a test but fails to apply their knowledge to a real world scenario. On the other hand you have a student who can take the various facets of a problem and create a solution that adheres to the nuances and minutia of that problem. Furthermore, Thomas Armstrong analyzes short comings of the standardized testing system: Because so much emphasis is placed on standardized test results these days, teachers are spending more and more time "teaching to the test." If there is something that is interesting, compelling, useful, or otherwise favorable to the development of a student"s understanding of the world, but it is not going to be on the standardized test, then there really isn"t any incentive to cover this material. Instead, most of classroom time consists of either taking the tests or preparing for the tests, and this shuts out the possibility of learning anything new or important. For example, because the No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB) only tests reading, math, and science that means that art, social studies, physical education, history, and other subjects are given far less attention than used to be the case. Standardized tests occur in an artificial learning environment: they"re timed, you can"t talk to a fellow student, you can"t ask questions, you can"t use references or learning devices, you can"t get up and move around. How often does the real world look like this? Prisons come to mind. And yet, even the most hard-headed conservative will say that education must prepare students for "the real world." Clearly standardized testing doesn"t do this. Standardized tests create stress. Some kids do well with a certain level of stress. Other students fold. So, again, there isn"t a level playing field. Brain research suggests that too much stress is psychologically and physically harmful. And when stress becomes overwhelming, the brain shifts into a "fight or flight" response, where it is impossible to engage in the higher-order thinking processes that are necessary to respond correctly to the standardized test questions. Standardized tests reduce the richness of human experience and human learning to a number or set of numbers. This is dehumanizing. A student may have a deep knowledge of a particular subject, but receive no acknowledgement for it because his or her test score may have been low. If the student were able to draw a picture, lead a group discussion, or create a hands-on project, he/she could show that knowledge. But not in a standardized testing room. Tough luck." (http://institute4learning.com...) At the end of the day it comes down to what you value. If we continue to put undue interest into the importance of standardized tests, we may generate a general testing template but we lose creativity and ingenuity in the long run.However, if we allow the classroom to foster creativity and critical thinking, we will in turn create a generation of people who are able to tackle the complex problems that face our world today. As it stands now, the status quo of standardized testing is detrimental to US education and should thus be reformed.

Title: Standardized Tests Content: As a person, who has lived through the standardized testing era first hand, I would like to refute the following points heavenly panda has made in support of standardized testing. 1. " Having standardized tests, would not only make students have to do well but also teachers." Define, "Doing well" I mean, having standardized tests, does increase the pressure for students and teachers to do well, however the question is, what does it pressure them to do well on? The answer to this question is standardized tests. Growing up in the standardized test era, Most of my teachers spent the majority of their time teaching their students how to do well on standardized tests. We were taught ways to eliminate answers on the multiple choice questions, in addition to this, teachers also dumbed down their curriculum, so they would have more time teaching students how to pass the standardized tests. Students also were trained to believe that every question only has one correct answer. Any student who dared to suggest otherwise, was shot down and told that whatever the test says is the correct answer. Even when the occasional error was found on the standardized tests, Students had no method of recourse when this happened and were not allowed to challenge the validness of the test's answer. This would not be the case in the working world( Ex. The existence of the Human Resources Department.) For anyone who is reading this argument, it is now clear how problematic standardized tests are. In the working world, students will not have answer choices of A. B. C. D. or E. with only one of these answers being correct. Students will need to come up with their own answers, and understand that no answer is necessarily correct above all else. Each possible answer a person comes up with has its benefits, in addition to having its downsides. For students to succeed they will need to be able to create their own answers, and be able to weigh out the pro's and cons of each to determine which one is the best..Creating finding, and picking a correct answer is only of secondary importance as many answers could be correct, however, what employers want the most for their employees is to come up with the best possible solution to problems, not just a correct one. Lets move on to point to your second point. 2. If marks went public, students and teachers would do better. Yep, they would do better.... on standardized tests! *See rebuttal to point one. OAK P.S. We already have standardized testing in elementary, middle school and high school. I know this because I lived through it and my younger sister is living through it now. Even with the existence of standardized testing teachers still could not fail their students. The ones who tried to were yelled at and belittled if they felt a student should be held back. Plus, quite a few schools already are public with regard to the schools test scores. Its the fact that these school's mark's are public, that teachers are yelled at for trying to fail students who aren't ready to enter the next grade level. It looks bad for the school and teachers if a student fails, even if the student failed because he/she refused to pay attention and ditched every other class. Schools and teachers are scared to fail students because the school could lose its funding, and teachers could lose there job if they do. Years ago, it was the fault of the student if they failed a class, now the teacher is blamed for failing a student who made no effort to learn the material.

Title: No Child Left Behind Act Content: Standardized tests may have cultural biases.

Title: Standardized Tests Content: Yes, if you create formal standards for the education system, the tests are probably necessary. I support the abolishment of all formal standards. They are designed to ensure that all students meet a certain criteria before they move on(see: No Child Left Behind). However, this also prevents superior students from moving forward with their education because they are stuck waiting for stupid kids. Standards are a terrible system for education.

Title: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States Content: In his round, I will be pointing out some information and then stating my own contentions. Since my opponent did not provide any definitions, I will now do so. Standardized testing- A type of test that has the same questions for every student, depending on age and grade level. It is scored in a manner which allows the results of students to be compared. Even though the first round is about stating points, I feel that it is crucial for me to point out PLAGIARISM. My opponent has given a quote by Lisa Adams. That quote was in Part A of Contention 1. And I would like to point out that my opponent did not site a source. You can compare his quote with the one www. boledebate. com/uploads/2/. .. /3-pf-standardized-testing-starter. docx. There is no difference. But now, to return to the discussion. Contention #1- Taking the tests can make something be remembered by the child. . http://www.theatlantic.com..., "Henry L. Roediger III, a cognitive psychologist at Washington University, studies how the brain stores, and later retrieves, memories. He compared the test results of students who used common study methods—such as re-reading material, highlighting, reviewing and writing notes, outlining material and attending study groups—with the results from students who were repeatedly tested on the same material. When he compared the results, Roediger found, “Taking a test on material can have a greater positive effect on future retention of that material than spending an equivalent amount of time restudying the material. ” Remarkably, this remains true “even when performance on the test is far from perfect and no feedback is given on missed information. ”" If the only way to make a child retain information is taking a standardized test, then why not? Schools are created to help children learn. And if the way to achieve a strong education system is by testing knowledge and encouraging hard work, the tests must stay. psychologists such as the one I have brought up above admit that while students may not enjoy standardized testing in particular, they at the end reach their goal- to be able to remember information they learn in school and to be able to apply it. Contention #2- Allow the comparison of scores of kids from different districts. . http://webcache.googleusercontent.com... " Public school students in the state of Texas are all required to take the same state standardized tests. This means that a student in Amarillo can be compared to a student in Dallas. Being able to accurately compare data is invaluable and is a major reason that the Common Core State Standards have been adopted. These will allow for a more accurate comparison between states. "With standardized testing, people can compare the intellectual differences between one another. In order, to know what level we are at, people must assess us based on a comparison to other people our age. Knowing a straight percent is not enough to know whether or not you are on the correct learning track or whether you are perhaps suffering in your learniang skills. Someone may take a test in New York and receive at 85. However, most of the other New Yorkers will receive 100. If you do not know how others are doing at education, you will not know how well you are doing on a larger scale. Contention #3- Proffesionals and parents support stndardized testing. . https://prezi.com... "Multiple-choice tests, in particular, are graded by machine and therefore are not subject to human subjectivity or bias A 2005 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll found that 60% of public school parents say the emphasis on testing in their local schools is either "about right" or that there is "not enough" testing. " . http://standardizedtests.procon.org... "In a 2009 Scholastic/Gates Foundation survey, 81% of US public school teachers said state-required standardized tests were at least "somewhat important” as a measure of students’ academic achievement, and 27% said they were "very important " or "absolutely essential. " 73% of teachers surveyed in a Mar. 2002 Public Agenda study said they "have not neglected regular teaching duties for test preparation. "" Many proffesionals admit that standardized tests are beneficial to child learning. Statistics show it! Parents understand it! Teachers see benefits! The education system is currently reaching its climax because of standardized testing. With this huge support of proffesionals, there will be no reason to stop testing. Contention #4- Standardized testing is a huge, indisposable industry. . http://www.pbs.org... "The National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy at Boston College compiled data from The Bowker Annual, a compendium of the dollar-volume in test sales each year, and reported that while test sales in 1955 were $7 million (adjusted to 1998 dollars), that figure was $263 million in 1997, an increase of more than 3,000 percent. Today, press reports put the value of the testing market anywhere from $400 million to $700 million. " Money, another benefit of standardized testing. The test industry earns a lot of money on a yearly basis. This money can be used to make adjustments of out education systems. If we modify and perfect our system of learning, it will be possible to make sure that testing is even more efficient than it is currently. Investments into the future is a solution which will fit everyone. Contention #5- Students consider standardized testing fair and square. . https://prezi.com... "Public Agenda survey of 1,342 public school students in grades 6-12 found that 71% of students think the number of tests they have to take is "about right" and 79% believe test questions are fair. The 2002 edition of the survey found that "virtually all students say they take the tests seriously and more than half (56 percent) say they take them very seriously. "" Before moving on to my final arguments, I would like to clarify one thing. Students dont enjoy these tests. They consider them fair. In fact, the student body should not like testing. They should feel that it is FAIR. However, they should like learning, The enjoying of learning at the feeling that tests are fair are corrolated. Contention #6- Standardized tests raise students confidence. . http://www.merriam-webster.com... "Confidence: : a feeling or belief that you can do something well or succeed at something : a feeling or belief that someone or something is good or has the ability to succeed at something : the feeling of being certain that something will happen or that something is true" On the news, you probably see stories about kids commiting suicide because of standardized testing. Those cases however, are extremely rare. What is common, is self esteem causing confidence. People tend to over exaggerate the small examples of bad things happening but tend to ignore positivity. Honestly, confidence is caused by being sure of yourself. That is what testing does. If students worked hard, they will know that they are smart. That is what happens in most of the cases. In addition, stress is caused by many other factors. So should we ban those too? Judges, I am sure that you can see why standardized testing has a positive influence on the education system. Thank you.

Title: No Child Left Behind Act Content: NCLB standardized tests are a poor measure of school performance

Title: Standardized testing should remain in our schools. Content: Okay first of all, standardized testing is needed to see where each individual is at academic wise. Standardized testing is proved to be the only way to see that without having to do one kid at a time and not having control over the classroom. Second of all, standardized testing helps see which teachers should remain teaching. Let's say that you have a really clumsy teacher who does not teach anything at all. And you know that nobody will believe you if you tell them that the teacher is not teaching. Standardized testing is a good way to see where the teachers are at, as well as the students. Standardized testing is also not expensive at all! The average amount of students in a school is 800 and each student costs $7 for testing materials and booklets. $7 times 800 equals an average of $5,600 dollars per school with testing, which is nothing compared to what the schools make! And with the money they give to the school systems, they know that the cost is beneficial to their school.

Title: Standardized testing should NOT be banned Content: Rebuttals 1. "SAT's give the school systems access to each student's achievement over the years." Standardized tests are taken on one day out of a year. This day may not be a good judgement of the skills the student has. I, for example, took the Pre-ACT (which is required in my state) after getting a concussion. It is well documented that SATs are not a good judge of a student's skills. A single test score at a young age that shows below average skills may cause a student to be placed in a Special Education program, which are programs that cause a habit cycle that children rarely escape from. This, of course, harms their future. Furthermore, selection based on these programs is racially influenced, as well as influenced by district, breeding disparity. The test scores also can cause a child to be held back a year, which often does not lead to better preformance than the first year in year two. [1]2. "SATs are not expensive at all, and only cost $7 per student". While it may be true that the required tests taken by students are not particularly expensive, the cost of them is often not even worth what the tests will give to the student. There is no evidence that testing actually improves students scores [2] - in fact, in countries like Finland, where standardized tests have been eradicated have had higher test scores [3] than other countries. 3. "SAT's show how well a teacher is teaching a certain material."Unfortunately, the idea that a teacher will be judged based off test scores leads to a way of teaching that is detrimental towards the student. Often the teacher teaches to what the child will be tested on, not in the best interest of the student. Of course, this breeds a variety of teaching in the U.S.A. I like to call "taught to know, not to learn". [4]4. "SAT's are good to practice because you have to pass them to become such professions as a pilot, lawyer, etc.."While that is true, to get into a program like becoming a pilot, lawyer, doctor, whatever else, you will have graduated from college, which almost always makes it necessary to have taken the SAT (not just a general Standardized Test, to be clear, the one that is taken by juniors out of 2200 points) and/or the ACT, which is good practice. Furthermore, optional Standardized tests would mean that students where practice in Standardized tets would be beneficial could take the tests, but where it wouldn't be (ex., I have a friend who has epilepsy and violently seizes upon taking any SATs from stress - I too am an epileptic, and tend to have seizures, though much less minor, during tests of that kind) they wouldn't have to take it. 5. "SATs show what level a student is at."In essence this is just a restatement of #1. 6. "SATs strengthen test taking skills for young ones."This too is basically a restatement, but I will still point out that it teaches bad skills, such as completing tests in the time limit, sitting in stressful rooms worrying, being taught that these tests are absolutely imperative to your life (which freaks children out), and being given bad mediums for preparing. Sources [1] http://beck.library.emory.edu... [2] http://standardizedtests.procon.org...[3] http://www.smithsonianmag.com...;[4] http://worklife.columbia.edu...

Title: Standardized testing should remain in our schools. Content: I am arguing that we do need standardized testing, so my opponent has to argue for the CON side.

Title: Test Content: This is not much of a debate - but I will state some of my personal beliefs on the negative effects of standardized testing. 1. No improvements - whatsoever.The stated goal of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was "An act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind."No child left behind - but since it was passed, the US education system has been left behind. When this legislature was signed, the US ranked 18th in math. In 2009 - seven short years later - the US had fallen to number 31. A similar drop occurred in science; reading scores have not changed quite so much. I am arguing that if the stated goal of No Child Left Behind - the program the jump started standardized testing - is to do what it says, it has not succeeded. In the same way, kids aren't succeeding as a whole. And the US education system is not succeeding, much less meeting the standards set before our younger generation. The USA recently ranked "average" among other world leaders in comparison to test scores. The large implementation of standardized testing has proved to be a drawback to this nation. 2. What is meaningful? Standardized testing does not measure what makes education meaningful. Gerald W. Bracey, PhD, a late education researcher, once stated that such tests cannot measure, "creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity." These are really what kick-starts a student's interest in learning. Tests do not measure this. 3. Drill 'n kill. A five-year study by the University of Maryland found that, ""the pressure teachers were feeling to 'teach to the test'" since NCLB (No Child Left Behind) was leading to "declines in teaching higher-order thinking, in the amount of time spent on complex assignments, and in the actual amount of high cognitive content in the curriculum." This quality is important to me - that students get what they are learning, and understand it, instead of them remembering it for the tests and then forgetting it over summer break and the years to come. 4. Science, social studies, and the arts? A 2007 study done across the nation found that 44% of school districts were cutting time on subject areas such as science, social studies, and the arts by an average of 145 minutes per week. Why? To make time for reading and math - the majority of what makes up standardized tests. Science, social studies, and the arts should not be reduced in importance to students - even younger students. Science helps them understand the world around us. Social studies increases their understanding of the governments, cultures, and peoples of the world. The arts - art, music, etc. - can spark creativity in their young minds. Reading and math are important - but science, social studies, and the arts are subject areas that shouldn't be ignored. Testing encourages these subjects to be almost eradicated from the teachers' agendas. 5. Test preparation. Some schools spend a quarter of their time on test preparation - this wastes precious instruction time. After NYC schools' reading and math scores plunged in 2010, "many schools imposed extra measures to avoid being shut down, including daily two and a half hour prep sessions and test practice on vacation days." "On Sep. 11, 2002, students at Monterey High School in Lubbock, TX, were prevented from discussing the first anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks because they were too busy with standardized test preparation."Take some time, I say, to truly teach the subjects. Sure, some review is good. But when a large amount of instruction time is wasted on test preparation, I think the concept of standardized testing goes a bit too far. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I want to cite the website that I am getting my facts from - http://standardizedtests.procon.org...This website provides both sides of the argument on standardized testing; however, I believe that the cons outweigh the pros.

Title: Standardized testing should NOT be banned Content: In today's bustling society, technology is advancing at an exponential rate. With this rapid growth of technology, students are becoming smarter than ever. For example, not only do students have the luxury of researching things at the click of a button but students also have accessibility to a wealth of information which once would have taken days to find at a library . Because of the ease of researching , school tests and quizzes can no longer be a harbinger in determining the potential success that a student can achieve. Therefore to determine what can be accomplished by a student, a policy of taking standardized testings should be ensconced. Not only will this provide a fair and equal opportunity for all students across the United States of America, but it will also allow job employers and college admissions people to have a relative idea on whether the student would be a 'good' asset to the company. In addition by taking standardized testings, it will allow the college admissions and job employers to quickly asses the students scores and not waste more time than the admission staff has to use. Therefore, establishing standardized testing will not only allow the people to have a quick assessment of the student but it will also reduce possible wasted time on both sides of the party.

Title: NCLB testing is done more widely with greater effect Content: "The Impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on Student Achievement and Growth". Northwest Evaluation Association. April 2005 - "State-level tests tend to improve observed achievement on an independent measure, and therefore, increasing the number of grades in which state tests are given may improve achievement more."

Title: The National Curriculum provides reference points of achievement for parents and government. Content: The Blair/Brown government is obsessed with targets, though their effectiveness seems marginal to say the least. The national curriculum does not effectively measure achievement in either students or teachers. Especially under a national curriculum that uses merit based pay. Using standardized tests encourages "teaching to the test" (teachers giving only the information that is required to pass the test). Now all our students are do is MEMORIZE and REGURGITATE information... as opposed to actually UNDERSTANDING the material (so as to be able to apply what they have learned). Overall standardized tests are ineffective at providing the information you argue that our policy makers need, because the results are often artificial.

Title: Standardized testing is not an accurate measure of ones intelligence Content: as I like to keep my opening arguments short, I will refrain from presenting much more than my simple argument Standardized testing is not an accurate measurement of intelligence. It does not encompass enough of the areas of the brain that lead to the difference in intelligence. Thank you and good luck to whoever accepts.

Title: Standardized tests poorly measure real student learning Content: Standardized testing often tests only a very limited range of skills rather than the broad range of skills we would hope our educational system is teaching. Standardized testing focuses largely on memorization, speed of recall, and critical thinking. Yet, a full education entails much more, including creativity, emotional insight, composure and dignity, physical health and an understanding of nutrition, and many other basic human values. NCLB, therefore, does not measure the most important factors in a student's education and future success and happiness. It is, therefore, useless as a measure of a student and school's performance.

Title: Hands on learning should be mandated in every school Content: "There is evidence that standardized tests fail to meet all of the desired affects. However, the standardized tests are also important in how schools get their accreditation and endowments. The government requires test scores to work with to make these judgments in performance. The idea of eliminating tests is in its infancy and would be extremely and unnecessarily risky to make the leap to eliminate standardized tests from our education system." Yes, and this indeed is the problem with the current system. It is so inefficient, yet people are reluctant to change it. Of course, a complete change in system will takes years if not decades, doing it in a matter of days or months is outrageous; nevertheless I am sure that it is necessary. In the beginning, schools should start small. Incorporate hands-on learning while still covering topics for the tests. Gather data regarding the effectiveness of hands-on learning then when enough data is gathered, a bigger change can be made. Deciding not to try applying hands-on learning at all just because it is difficult when the benefits are very clear is insane. "here are many reasons that could explain why students are not learning important critical thinking and "higher-order" thinking skills. While the method in which it is being taught be a part of it, I believe the larger part of the issue is our relaxed culture that many (if not most) students take part in." It is true that there are several reasons, which includes lack of reading and too much messing around, but keep in mind that often, students mess around too much because they think they are not learning anything from class or can get away with skipping classes because they can still do tests easily. I've had friends and classmates that skip classes and still get As. Study also shows that part of the reasons why students are not taking part in classes because they find the class boring or that they can learn it better without participating in class. http://www.browndailyherald.com... "There are issues with applying hands-on learning at the college level. Many students can find many activities to be trivial and quickly lose interest (I experienced that a few times), focusing on making the activities fun can actually hamper learning, failing to reflect on activities academically (usually in a lecture) ultimately makes the whole activity educationally pointless, and many abstract topics simply does not invite the idea of activities." I can say the same with lecture based classes. Many students find them dull and students who are non visual and auditory learners will suffer in classes like those. I am not saying to treat learning as a game. While it can still be fun, it should be emphasized that the activities are part of the learning process and should not be taken as a joke.

Title: introduce year round schooling. Content: Improves student achievement.

Title: Standardized Testing is beneficial for students K-12 in America Content: First, the rules have stated that you back up your claims with adequate evidence. You have not provided any evidence, so I ask that you provide evidence from now on. Your point one is saying that standardized testing takes away from class time. Standardized testing teaches things in the test, so you are saying that standardized tests teach too much about the tests and too little about the other subjects. This is another way of saying "teaching to the test." According to Marcus Hirn, ""Teaching to the test" can be a good thing because it focuses on essential content and skills, eliminates time-wasting activities that don't produce learning gains, and motivates students to excel. [18] The US Department of Education stated in Nov. 2004 that "if teachers cover subject matter required by the standards and teach it well, then students will master the material on which they will be tested--and probably much more." [19]" This is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. Your second point is saying that standardized testing is stressful. However, according to Jay Rakow, founder of ProCon.org, Testing is not too stressful for students. The US Department of Education stated: "Although testing may be stressful for some students, testing is a normal and expected way of assessing what students have learned." [19] A Nov. 2001 University of Arkansas study found that "the vast majority of students do not exhibit stress and have positive attitudes towards standardized testing programs." Standardized testing is NOT stressful, and the little stress it exhibits is normal and expected in life. Your third point is standardized testing does not affect student's grades. It actually provides the state with how students are DOING WELL. This is effective. Your solution, using students' overall grades, is ineffective. Worksheets and projects are good ways to test students about little categories here and there, but a standardized test is basically a big worksheet covering EVERYTHING. Now, onto my case. Contention 1: Standardized Testing Holds Educators Accountable (Hughes 2015) Their objectivity and ability to measure student learning, standardized tests are useful tools for holding teachers, schools, and districts accountable for success or failure. The tests help education officials pinpoint where something isn't working in a school or district. Contention 2: The alternative to Standardized Testing is Tenure, a proven failure. (Winters 2012) Their potential contribution to improving teacher quality--the single most important school based factor for fostering student learning--far outweighs the upfront cost. The alternatives to standardized testing have proved to fail, therefore standardized testing is the only possible program left. Contention 3: Standardized testing allows us to determine the most effective teaching strategies, and to make them contextually specific. Geir (2007) Several studies have examined the impacts of inquiry science interventions on measured achievement as they scale up to enactment across multiple schools involving thousands of students. In an experiment in 2006, data suggests a cumulative effect of the intervention as students participate over several years. The data describes positive achievement effects from a standards-based curriculum unit enacted in 10 urban middle schools. Contention 4: All effective educators determine instructional approach by adjusting to data revealed by assessment. More data is not bad, provided it's more accurate than no data at all. Aycock (2014) How would we know what kids know without assessments? That"s the purpose of testing kids " to figure out what they know and are able to do. Assessments also give us data to inform instruction. If I teach something, but my class still hasn"t mastered it, then as a teacher I need to examine how I taught it the first time in order to teach it better next time. Likewise, if my class already knows something, I don"t need to teach it to them; we can move on to other things. Maybe most of my class have mastered a skill, but a handful need more time. Either way, I need data to inform my teaching " and that data comes from assessments. In sum, testing lets us know what kids know and can do, which helps us teach them better. Contention 5: Standardized Testing evaluates and improves student performance. Hughes (2015) Standardized testing is an indicator of skill. They are excellent objective indicators of student performance. The tests are designed to measure how well students learned the skills important tot meet state standards. Contention 6: Standardized Testing reveals and corrects flaws in students Flanagan (2009) Standardized testing yield quantifiable info results that can be used in screening programs, identifying students in need of further assessment. Standardized test results provide info regarding an examiner's areas of strength and weakness. Standardized tests can be used to assess students' progress over time results from a test administered in a standardized fashion can be empirically verified. This allows for results to be interpreted and ideas about an individual's skills generalized. That is why you should vote Aff.

Title: Resolved on balance Content: I apologized for not making my style of debating clear from the beginning. I first present evidence to support the agrument I'm making, then I later make analytical arguments at the end. I see how this may have been confusing. BUT this doesn't mean my argument is false, that would be a "fallacy fallacy" (). And saying you don't need to present any further arguments just shows how week your argument is the first place. Now my plan for Round three is to present two pieces of evidence (I only put in the parts I thought nessary in order to save time reading) and then move on to analytical arguments to directly address your arguments. Argument 1. Why we don"t need standardized testing http://www.edweek.org... There are two main arguments against using standardized tests to guarantee that students reach at least a basic level of academic competency. The first is radical: These tests are not necessary. The second"less radical and more familiar"is that, even if standardized testing were an efficient benchmark of basic skills, the costs associated with it are too high. Standardized tests are unnecessary because they rarely show what we don't already know. Ask any teacher and they can tell you which students can read and write. That telling usually comes in the form of letter grades or evaluations that break down progress on skills. So trust the teacher. Publish grade distributions. Locally publish a compilation of evaluation reports. Release a state or national report reviewed and verified by expert evaluators with legislative oversight. People will say: "That's crazy! Schools will fudge results. Grade data means nothing because teachers apply different standards with different values. Let's give them all one reliable test. And won't this proposal create a whole new bureaucracy?" All true (except for the one test being reliable). Given high stakes and the accompanying pressure, people will game a system. And it is all too true that grades vary widely because of four factors: a teacher's conception of achievement, a teacher's sense of equity and rigor, a teacher's ability, and the composition of students. But people are already gaming standardized testing, sometimes criminally. And, at a basic level of competency, a grade or an evaluative report would give us as much information as we now get from standardized tests. We have the grade problem at my high school. In the same course or department, a B in one classroom might be an A, or even a C, in another. It's a problem for us, and, likely, a problem in most schools. "To sum up, we don"t learn much from standardized accountability, and we have lost a great deal by giving it so much prominence." Arguement 2. Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching http://www.npr.org... No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education," she tellsFresh Air's Terry Gross. "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools " or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not " because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today." No Child Left Behind required schools to administer yearly state standardized tests. Student progress on those tests was measured to see if the schools met their Adequate Yearly Progress goals. or AYP. Schools missing those goals for several years in a row could be restructured, replaced or shut down. "The whole purpose of federal law and state law should be to help schools improve, not to come in and close them down and say, 'We're going to start with a clean slate,' because there's no guarantee that the clean slate's going to be better than the old slate," says Ravitch. "Most of the schools that will be closed are in poor or minority communities where large numbers of children are very poor and large numbers of children don't speak English. Schools undercut the opportunities for public schools, making public school students feel like "second-class citizens.It's simply a way of avoiding the public responsibility to provide good education." Analytical arguments: 1. C1. by taking tests the students don't see how much they know just how much they can memorize right before taking a test; the information doesn't stick they can cram information the night before and then forget it all in a week. The purpose of education is to learn information and then use it later in the world and tests undermine that. -also standardized test don't tell the student anything they don't already know. Most students are already well aware if whether they know something or not; even if they didn't they have grades which provide more information than any test as it consists of more studies. 2. C2. we can make the term standardized tests broad enough so it covers all forms of tests. But most of the issues lie in the tests which do occur once a year as they hold the biggest impact on the students future. 3. C3. Just because a student does well on a test doesn't mean he or she know the information. Most student's don't consistently study, rather they cram all the information the night before, students who do study are much more likely to experience a block than students who cram info. (http://www.galamind.com...) -also there are, as we know today, three types of learners, tactile, audio and visual. and test only favor visual. Conclusion: Due to the lack of the pros arguments I uphold my belief to that standardized testing is NOT beneficial to k-12 education in the United States, and I urge the affirmation of the resolution.

Title: Resolved: Standardized test scores accurately reflect the academic value of students. Content: 1. My opponent's first arguement was that if a student is knowledgeable his test results will be consistent. I don't know where my opponent is going with this point. I provided an expert quote saying that the test results varried and were not consitent all my opponent did was say that they were in response. 2. In response to my second contention which I entitled "The Luck Factor" my opponent said that one still needed to know a little just to make an educated guess. Even if they are making "Educated Guesses" (which at the end of the day are still just guesses) you still do not have a full grasp of the material and are still just guessing. 3. My opponent said that test atmosphere is normal and if a student is prepared they will be fine. For some students being prepared will make them feel "fine" but for some students even undertsanding and having a full grasp of the material isn't enough. Many students still "choke" under pressure and can't demeonstrate an undertsanding of the material simply becuase there scared. 4. My opponent said that standardized testing is a good representation of a students academic value and also a good representation of the teachers. I belive I have already disproved this point. Standardized testing is to inaccurate to be used to represent a student or even a teacher. I thank you all and urge you all to vot CON!

Title: State Standardized Tests Content: None of that has to to with the debate topic. Unless you're saying that standardized tests are useless because absolute knowledge is unobtainable. That's kinda silly though. The goal of education and science are to create models of what seems to be reality, not to understand reality exactly. Absolute knowledge is unnecessary. Rockets and computers and heart surgery work just fine without absolute knowledge. But in order to become an astronaut or computer scientist or heart surgeon, a person needs to demonstrate that he possesses the required knowledge and is capable of obtaining more. Furthermore, because not everyone can be an astronaut or computer scientist or heart surgeon, there needs to be a means by which to compare people so that the most capable people are rewarded for their achievement. That's why standardized tests are necessary.

Title: should standardised testing be eliminated Content: Standardised testing should not be eliminated, it should be improved and made more difficult. Why you may ask? It's simple, we as a nation are falling behind. Our kids know absolutely nothing. These test you want to eliminate help the school systems know where they need to improve. Nothing good will come from eliminating this from the school. Instead we should be pushing kids to do better and encouraging them to keep learning. Not the opposite. Without the test kids can just do nothing and still pass till they graduate and spend the rest of their life at mcdonalds.

Title: Resolved: Public high school students in the United States ought be required to pass standardize Content: Is social advancement, lack of objective standards, and avoiding stress on students really best for students or the country? Is core competence in some subjects more important than competence in other subjects? Should employers expect a high school diploma to mean something? Those are the questions considered in this debate. I claim that exit testing from high school, done to non-trivial standards, is a basic step in restoring meaningful education. Con's arguments against the imperfections of testing apply to all tests by anyone on any subject for any purpose. All tests induce anxiety in the test taker, have imperfect questions, and can be made too simple to guarantee anything. Con's reference said that insofar as exit exams have been implemented, they are all too easy to guarantee competence. The overall failure rate is only 1%-2%, including the states with more difficult tests. Employers agree the the tests certify nothing. In this debate, I have consistently advocated raising the test standard from eighth grade competence to at least tenth grade competence. If anything, it ought to be higher than that. I raised the point that everyone from airline pilots to hairdressers must pass standardized tests, despite all the real-world limitations of testing. Con never suggested that such testing ought to abandoned, and his only counter was that high school students were too young to be stressed. Stress in part of life, and a very necessary part of learning. That applies not only to math and science, but to sports, games, debate tournaments, and even dating. No one, not even Con, suggests it is important to reduce stress in those other areas. Con argues that test anxiety is detrimental to learning. Anyone who says that they will study just as hard if there is no test as they do if there is a stiff test is a born storyteller. It is not remotely credible. Con erroneously claimed that testing costs a lot. He abandoned the point after it was shown to be less than $12 per year. Con claimed that it was unfair to a person's whole future depend on one test, but it is universally allowed to let failing students retake the test many times. Con claimed that subjects not tested are ignored, and provided some evidence that teachers ignore them. I argued that if teachers are foolishly spending time teaching eighth grade subjects to a student who is already competent at that level, then the problem lies with the teaching, not the testing. The remedy is better curriculum guidance. Beyond that, states are left to determine what subjects are tested in the exit exam and which are not. If there is too much language, math, and science and not enough of something else, educators can change the balance. Con did not respond to either argument. The organization that Con cited for international rankings, PISA, says on their web site that they only test science and that they include measures of enthusiasm for the subject, not just what students know. No matter what they test, , the European systems Con believes we should emulate are mediocre. He says we ought not use the best school systems, the ones in Asia, for comparison because "it's ingrained in their culture that they are hard workers." I think that means that we need to ingrain hard work into American schools, not that we ought to strive for mediocrity. We are competing in world markets, so we need to bring our standards up to that level. Even if we somehow convince ourselves that mediocrity is good enough, it should be an honest mediocrity measured by objective testing, not by awarding fraudulent diplomas. Meaningful testing would raise standards and reward those who do work hard with meaningful diplomas. The benefits of exit exams are to provide employers and others with an objective certification of competence. Con's objections are largely trivial; the best school systems rely on standardized testing and get the best results as a consequence. Objective standardized tests also indicate how well schools are doing their jobs, and we need to know that to know which need improvement. The resolution is affirmed.

Title: A teacher's pay should be merit-based. Content: Thanks again to my opponent for what continues to be an interesting and stimulating debate. I will adopt the same approach as my opponent has done in this round and begin with general arguments before moving on to specifics. My opponent and I agree that the current system of standardised testing is inherently flawed. We also both agree that the current situation where schools in more privileged socio-economic areas attract the best teachers because of higher salaries is unfair and not in the interests of improving the education of the population as a whole. I have proposed a system of equal pay with bonuses awarded to teachers who can demonstrate the most significant improvements in individuals learning, based around independent peer evaluation. I believe this would alleviate most of the problems in the education system that my opponent describes. She maintains that peer evaluation is non-viable and that the problems she outlines are tied directly to the idea of merit-based pay. It is these contentions that I will attempt to disprove in this round. "1. The peer evaluation system is not politically, logistically, or ethically viable, or at least not moreso than a standardized testing model." I believe that the fairtest.org article clearly argues that it is ethically and logistically preferable to standardised testing. As for party politics, as I suggested in the previous round these should not be allowed to get in the way of the fact that we 'should' be implementing the best policies possible. "a. It isn't universally applicable in any way: keep in mind that my opponent clearly conceded that, in order to pay a teacher based on merit, the measurement of the merit must be universally established." Sincere apologies to my opponent if I have misled her in any way, but I'm not sure what I said that suggested I conceded this fact. I don't remember arguing for a universal testing system and don't advocate one, I believe the pupils should be assessed on their individual achievements not on their conformance to a standardised grade or even curriculum. I did suggest a universal basic rate of pay for teachers (before merit-based bonuses) so maybe this is where the confusion arises. "Which teachers will assess? How will the localities be assigned assessment teachers? How will we ensure that all assessors have the same concept of how to meet educational goals?.... ....b. It isn't logistically possible: teachers are already incredibly pressed for time, especially with shrinking budgets and school years..... ....c. It doesn't solve the problem of flawed assessment systems: how will peer evaluating teachers measure academic success? Via grades? GPA? Test scores? Project results?" I don't claim to have all the answers to making peer-evaluation work, but I think the panel of independent judges assessing student performance as described in the fairtest.org article sounds like a decent model. As I said I don't necessarily support a standardised curriculum, but trained judges should be able to accurately assess whether a pupil's knowledge and academic abilities have improved without resorting to such a system and without as much opportunity for the teacher who will be rewarded being able to unfairly manipulate the results. Remember that we want teachers to be motivated to do their best to improve their students results. We just need to make sure they do this fairly. A system that rewards the bad teachers and the good the same does not motivate either to try harder. "1. I've disproved my opponents alternative as viable above. I also would like to point out his concession on accountability requiring universal standards, which is key to why his alternative cannot be successful. 2. Corruption is inherent in merit-based pay." I don't think proving that there would be difficulties in implementing something is the same as proving it non-viable, certainly not the same as proving it should not be a desired course of action. Again ,apologies but don't recall making this concession and can't find it when scanning through previous rounds. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I do not believe my opponent has proved that corruption is inherent to merit-based pay. "states were not doing this until their educational performance affected school budgets. It is directly analogous to the affect merit pay will have on individual schools and students." I see these as two distinct situations, not directly analogous at all. In my model which is just one of countless hypothetical ones you could apply, bonuses would apply to individual teachers not school or state budgets, which would be a very different case. "3. The problems of socioeconomic, ethnic, and geographic locations will still exist within that utopian plan. These problems are inherent with or without peer evaluation. There is nothing to say that a given peer evaluation team would not be a suburban team coming into a rural school, or an urban team coming into a suburban school, where the learning environment can be completely different." I think the fairtest.org article again makes it clear that for such a system to work "it is necessary to enact safeguards to ensure that race, class, gender, linguistic or other cultural biases do not affect evaluation." So there is something in my argument to say that such a situation as described by my opponent should not occur. "my scenario of teachers flocking to places where merit-based pay is far more likely will become a quick reality." Yes but in the "utopian" system these places would be exactly those where performance is lowest and are in most need of good teachers. This would ultimately be of great benefit to society as a whole, a better educated populace being more economically sound and (in theory at least) having more regard for law, order and decency. "The public will not accept, and should not accept, two classrooms of the same grade with vastly different abilities." There will always be children in every classroom with vastly different abilities. People are all better at different things. The idea of every child nationwide of a certain grade being at exactly the same level of achievement can not be a reality, so why every class? "Improvement is only a piece of achievement, as my opponent admits in his initial debate posting." Maybe this then was perceived as my concession of universal standards: "this should apply not merely to getting the highest marks or the most number of A-grades in a class but should rather be a measurement of the 'distance-travelled' by pupils." I can see how my use of 'merely' could have been misconstrued to suggest the notion of incorporating but I think 'rather' makes my real position clearer. "2. While you may think it is easy to implement, two things stand in the way of us accepting this as a possible reality" I never meant to imply it would be easy just not "monumentally expensive." The fact that something is difficult does not make it impossible and does not mean if it is a good idea we should not attempt to implement it. Due to space limitations I apologise that I can not answer my opponents last three rebuttals in this round, but if my opponent invites me to, I would be happy to display my responses in the comments section. Anyway I believe I have argued that corruption is a separate issue and not necessarily inherent to merit-based pay and that peer-evaluation while admittedly having it's difficulties could effectively diminish the spectre of corruption. Once again a teacher's pay should be merit-based. Thanks.

Title: Education: Testing Content: Test scores is a superior way to measure teachers" effort and ability to do their job (1). The higher the test courses from students, the better the teacher is. Furthermore, standardized tests are a just measure of student achievement, along with ensuring teachers and schools are accountable to taxpayers (2). Standardized testing is approved by students and parents for being such an efficient system. (1) http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org... (2) http://standardizedtests.procon.org...

Title: NCLB testing wrongly assumes all children are the same. Content: Any system of standardized testing (in order to pass a class) assumes that all students progress at the same rate. But this is not the case. Talented students and un-talented students should not be measured by the same standardized test.

Title: Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to k-12 education in the United States. Content: Why we don"t need standardized testing Resolved: On Balance standardized testing is beneficial to k-12 education in the Unites States. Standardized tests don"t provide any further information we don"t already know - Greg Jouriles 14 http://www.edweek.org... There are two main arguments against using standardized tests to guarantee that students reach at least a basic level of academic competency. The first is radical: These tests are not necessary. The second"less radical and more familiar"is that, even if standardized testing were an efficient benchmark of basic skills, the costs associated with it are too high. Standardized tests are unnecessary because they rarely show what we don't already know. Ask any teacher and they can tell you which students can read and write. That telling usually comes in the form of letter grades or evaluations that break down progress on skills. So trust the teacher. Publish grade distributions. Locally publish a compilation of evaluation reports. Release a state or national report reviewed and verified by expert evaluators with legislative oversight. People will say: "That's crazy! Schools will fudge results. Grade data means nothing because teachers apply different standards with different values. Let's give them all one reliable test. And won't this proposal create a whole new bureaucracy?" All true (except for the one test being reliable). Given high stakes and the accompanying pressure, people will game a system. And it is all too true that grades vary widely because of four factors: a teacher's conception of achievement, a teacher's sense of equity and rigor, a teacher's ability, and the composition of students. But people are already gaming standardized testing, sometimes criminally. And, at a basic level of competency, a grade or an evaluative report would give us as much information as we now get from standardized tests. We have the grade problem at my high school. In the same course or department, a B in one classroom might be an A, or even a C, in another. It's a problem for us, and, likely, a problem in most schools. "To sum up, we don"t learn much from standardized accountability, and we have lost a great deal by giving it so much prominence." But it has also been an opportunity. Recognizing our grading differences, we opted to create a common conception of achievement, our graduate profile, and department learning outcomes with rubrics. Our standards now align closely with the Common Core State Standards. Second, we created common performance tasks that measure these standards and formative assessments that scaffold to them. Third, we look together at student work. Fourth, we have begun to grade each other's students on these common tasks. We could publish the results of these performance tasks, and the public would have a good idea of what we're good at and what we're not. For example, our students effectively employ reading strategies to comprehend a text, but are often stymied by a lack of vocabulary or complex syntax. We've also learned most of our students can coherently develop a claim, citing the appropriate evidence to support it when choosing from a restricted universe of data. They aren't as good when the universe of data is broadened. They are mediocre at analysis, counter-arguments, rebuttals, and evaluation of sources, though they have recently gotten better at evaluating sources as we have improved our instruction and formative assessments. A small percentage of our students do not show even basic competency in reading and writing. That's better information than we've ever received from standardized testing. What's also started to happen is that teachers who use the same standards and rubrics, assign the same performance tasks, and grade each other's work are finding their letter grades starting to align. And, this approach has led to a lot of frank discussions. For example, why are grades different? Where we have looked, different conceptions of achievement and rigor seem most important. So we have to talk about it. The more we do, the more aligned we will become, and the more honest picture of achievement we can create. It has been fantastic professional development"done without external mandates. We have a long way to go, but we can understand the value of our efforts and see improvement in student work. I would not advocate publishing individual teachers' grades because it would cause the same problems as publishing individual teachers' standardized-test results, but grades by subject, grade level, and demographic categories could be fair game externally. Internally, those breakdowns should stimulate hard conversations and necessary professional development. Of course, this proposal would have to be negotiated and modified locally to avoid the punishment/reward cycle of other accountability measures that force people to conform and tempt them to cheat. The goal is to spur the collaboration and conversation necessary for improvement. Well, that's your district, some might say. It's got a unique collaborative culture and a better sense of achievement than most. You can't do that across the nation. Why not? With the common core, a definition of achievement exists. And teachers are more likely to respond to professional development and accountability more concretely connected to their daily work. They are more likely to improve. That leads to the second argument. Even if standardized testing were not only desirable to give the public a picture of basic competencies, but also an efficient way to do so, the costs have been too great. Many have previously made cogent arguments (unrealistic definitions of achievement, skewed instructional schemes, inequitable curricular offerings, inevitable corruption, perverted charter school missions, alienation, disempowerment, and embarrassment of educators, etc.) in this vein, but let's think about a supposed example of success on this front"a school with the high test scores. In general, such a school has a compliant or affluent population. Test scores are a point of pride. The school has a good reputation. But, when you go in and observe, the teaching and learning do not impress. Never once have I looked at the test scores of this kind of school and thought, "How could I be more like them?" That's because success represented just a score on a narrow test of a limited band of achievement (a test, by the way, with content that I was not even legally allowed to talk about), and I couldn't see how looking at that score could help me in my day-to-day teaching. Even worse, I don't think the teachers at such schools have learned much from their good scores. If anything, the scores have prevented them from becoming better. So, to sum up, we don't learn much from standardized testing, and we have lost a great deal by giving it so much prominence. The common core is at risk for failure, not because the standards are bad per se, but because with standardized accountability, as in so many partial reforms, we again won't get a real picture of achievement, people will be disappointed, and the standards and testing will run their course. Instead, why not just trust teachers and schools to report the progress of their students with the measures they have, and use internal and external local pressures to improve the measures and practices? It will avoid a plethora of social, emotional, and political costs. Any bureaucracy created can't be more of a drag on the government or economy than the legion of consultants and think tanks today feeding off the trough of education. This proposal is more in line with what we know about the success of sustainable local organizations and what we know about the inflated rise and inevitable fall of mass reform.

Title: Establish education policy to significantly increase academic achievement in secondary schools Content: 1) a 2010 study in Rochester showed that children placed in an expeditionary learning school resulted in substantial and statistically significant achievement advantages for elementary students in English/language arts (ELA) and math, and for both years of middle school ELA. http://elschools.org.... "Effect sizes suggest that the EL schools in this study are substantially closing achievement gaps for students eligible for free or reduced price lunch, English language learners, and African-American and Hispanic students. In many cases, the achievement gap was completely closed. " 2) In schools, standardized tests are the way to measure quality of education. Standardized tests show much information the student can retain, how well the teacher are presenting the material, etc. http://www.cse.ucla.edu... 3) Of course there could never be a 100% fix. I am not sure where you obtained your information, but according to my source, test scores actually went up and it is working on our children. The gap in achievement is closing. With changes made and more progress, the NCLB Act could help improve children's quality of education among other factors as well. http://www2.ed.gov...

Title: Standardized testing accuaretly represents a student's academic ability. Content: Thank you, Con, for starting this debate. I generally feel the same way that you do, but in the spirit of debating, I would like to "test" you if I could. hahaha I'm so punny. As Pro, I have to state what my opponent has said in his title. I believe that standardized testing accurately represents a student's academic ability. That is, for each of the subjects that are covered in the standardized tests, those parts accurately test the abilities of that student. "Standardized testing can be composed of multiple-choice, true-false, essay questions, authentic assessments, or nearly any other form of assessment. Multiple-choice and true-false items are often chosen because they can be given and scored inexpensively and quickly by scoring special answer sheets by computer or via computer-adaptive testing. Some standardized tests have short-answer or essay writing components that are assigned a score by independent evaluators who use rubrics (rules or guidelines) and benchmark papers (examples of papers for each possible score) to determine the grade to be given to a response. Most assessments, however, are not scored by people; people are used to score items that are not able to be scored easily by computer (i.e., essays). For example, the Graduate Record Exam is a computer-adaptive assessment that requires no scoring by people (except for the writing portion)."[1] These standardized exams test the important subjects, on different levels, so one would need to know how to write, decipher correct answers from the wrong ones, and deal with "true/false" statements. Standardized tests are used to examine a students ability to answer those questions in the fields of math, science, history, and English. "In the field of psychometrics, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing place standards about validity and reliability, along with errors of measurement and individuals with disabilities. The third and final major topic covers standards related to testing applications, credentialing, plus testing in program evaluation and public policy." [2] This means that the results are accurate, and can be generalized with all of the other students who take the same or similar tests around the country. This helps keep the testing process inexpensive, fast, reliable, and accurate. Point 1. Pressure. Students are put under pressure while taking this test, and anyone who has will agree. This is also true in the workplace, because there are usually deadlines to finish work by. This actually helps students get used to the grind of the work day, because no matter what you choose as an occupation, there is going to be pressure involved. It would be impossible to test every student in their own perfect and personal environment. This would require far too much supervision and if it were to be administered anywhere outside of educational supervision, it would be void and subject to cheating anyway. As far as the dependency of the students future riding on these tests, I would disagree that for a successful future, students must do well on these tests. There are plenty of rich, successful people who didn't even finish college or do well on standardized tests. There are a few (like the SAT and the ACT) that help you get into some prestigious schools, but ones future is not dependent on these tests. 2. I agree with you that debating can be seen as an academic pursuit, and that someone with great debating skills won't be able to show the testers that they have great debating skills. However, to be a good debater, one must have the skills that they do test in standardized tests such as the English/language, history, and writing portions. A failure to spell and have good grammar would actually hinder your debating. (As seen in another debate I am currently in.) [3] Knowing history helps you to pinpoint good arguments and being up good sources to help support debating. Aside from debating, math and science are basic fundamentals in education. Sure, one could skate by only knowing basic math and science, but or someone to excel in their respective fields, one must know what they test on the standardized tests. The tests help educators find those people who deserve awards or grants to help support their future education. Again, it would be impossible to compile a test for everyone to take that would include more specific skill sets. The test is long enough as it is; adding to the test would create more pressure and would end up hurting the students who have a good grasp of English, science, math, and history because it would require them to know even more than they should at that point in their life. On a side note, I agree that there should be more specific subjects in tests, but they should be optional and used to help you occupationally so that you can find a job easier. [1] http://www.ets.org... [2] http://www.apa.org... [3] http://www.debate.org...

Title: Standardized testing accuaretly represents a student's academic ability. Content: I am aware that this topic may not be overtly captivating but this is an upcomming topic of mine so I decided to gt some practice on it. Before I begin I would like to lay down a few rules: ------------------------------------------------------------ I want to keep this debate fairly brief for this purpose I have set the character max. to 5,000 Please do not except this debate unless you plan to respond PLEASE give me feed back, not inherently on what occurs in this debate but on additional arguments for Pro or Con if you would like to post the link to some good evidence please do that as well. Of coarse this is optional but I really would appreciate it. And with that my opening speech: Point 1. The pressure. Standardized testing creates an environment in which hinders children from being able to truly do there best. Standardized testing creates an enormous amount of pressure on kids to do well because they know that a large part of there future could be depending on these tests. In addition these test often cost money in order to take. In lower in come communities often families break there backs in order to raise enough money to purchase such tests for there children. In these cases not only is your future dependent on these tests but you are worried that you will fail thus putting $100 or so dollars that your family worked hard to earn to waste. Point 2 lack of subjects: One might say that debate is an academic pursuit and I would agree that it is. A child may be very good in debate but do poorly in math, science, language, and history. Standardized testing does not include debate so the childs one good skill would be ignored however he would do poorly on the other fields and then essentially be deemed "unintelligent. "

Title: Standardized Testing...the person with the dumbest/craziest points wins Content: SHENANIGANS!IT HAS BEEN PROVEN BY PSEUDO-SCIENCES THAT STANDARDIZED TESTS LET YOU LIVE LONGER AND HEALTHIER AND REDUCE STRESS! MY FRIEND'S, NEIGHBOR'S, COUSIN'S, DOG LIVED 100 YEARS BECAUSE HIS OWNER TOOK STANDARDIZED TESTS. THUS, IT IS CONCLUSIVE, YOU NEED STANDARDIZED TESTS OR YOU WILL DIE YOUNG. GOOD LUCK BEATING THAT KIND OF LOGIC, CON!

Title: Education: Testing Content: Standardized testing has been used for many years, so why should the US change the system now if it has obviously been running well this entire time? "Standardized tests have been a part of American education since the mid-1800s. Their use skyrocketed after 2002's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandated annual testing in all 50 states" (2). It is an extremely useful tool when measuring students, teachers, and schools overall. It is ignorant to think that standardized testing is unfair just because one student may have less intelligence than other. In fact, that just proves both the students focus skills during school and their teachers ability to teach. Examples of a pro-testing education leader is Michelle Rhee, the public schools chancellor in Washington, D.C., who said, ""In order to have the privilege of teaching kids you have to be able to show that you can significantly move their academic achievement levels, she says. "And if you can't show that, then you need to find another profession." Rhee launched a controversial evaluation system in Washington where test score growth counts as 50 percent of a teacher's annual performance score" (1). In addition to Rhee"s statement, standardized testing has other positive outcomes: "Standardized tests are not narrowing the curriculum, rather they are focusing it on important basic skills all students need to master. According to a study in the Oct. 28, 2005, issue of the peer-reviewed 'Education Policy Analysis Archives', teachers in four Minnesota school districts said standardized testing had a positive impact, improving the quality of the curriculum while raising student achievement" (2). In conclusion, not only is standardized testing proven to be fair, but it is also proven to be beneficial to everyone involved.

Title: should standardised testing be eliminated Content: either way. standardized tests do not really go as for college as SATs do. Colleges don't really worry about them. S.T. also takes away time from the curriculum that the teachers are supposed to teach, and therefore should be eliminated.

Title: Standardized testing is hurting our school population and community Content: I believe that standardised testing is beneficial to students. Indeed, there will be an added amount of pressure and stress, but I believe that this helps them propel them forward toward striving for success. Stress is an important catalyst in one's motivation to work and if wisely wielded, can be a powerful tool in the advancement of education hence it is not necessarily a bad thing. Standardised testing is a means for a government to know where it stand in terms of further educational and holistic development and is also highly useful in education analysis. Without standardised testing, it will not be known if the students of a certain level are performing up to par, and without the proper Intel to make due changes and altercations to the education system, this can be dangerous for a country to be grooming substandard future population which would inevitably hinder society and have drastic implications on the work force. For example, in Singapore, there are standardised tests that occur twice each year on the average in primary, secondary schools and even junior college. These tests give the schools and government information on the amount of resources that should be diverted toward education sector, whether the Budget should increase or decrease, and also gives insight on the effectiveness ok current curriculum and providing incentive for change or improvement. Standardised testing has proved to be extremely beneficial to Singapore, and it is one of the most educationally advanced and successful countries in the education sector that many other countries tend to go on a pilgrimage for.

Title: Kids learn just as much at a public school then a private school. Content: Studies have found that kids do better on standardized tests, when they attend private school. They typically go on to do better in life and attend better universities. http://nces.ed.gov... quoting Cape.org "In a June 2002 report, NCES found that private schools had students who scored higher on standardized tests, had more demanding graduation requirements, and sent more graduates to college than public schools. The report said that students who had completed at least the eighth grade in a private school were twice as likely as other students to graduate from college as a young adult. NCES statistics also showed that students in private schools are much more likely than others to take advanced-level high school courses." http://www.capenet.org... studies have determined that students do better in a safe and supportive environment. http://nces.ed.gov... , and private schools have been determined to provide a safer environment than public schools. http://nces.ed.gov... You just can't deny the evidence. Kids in private schools do better on standardized tests. They are more likely to get a Bachelors degree and also ar more likely to attend advanced placement classes. http://www.capenet.org... This is a pretty simple case. I am just arguing a truism at this point.

Title: should standardised testing be eliminated Content: I believe that standardized testing should be eliminated. They are not even a way for one to show their intellect.

Title: Hands on learning should be mandated in every school Content: "Quick off topic question, where do you study?" I study at Southeast Technical Institute: http://southeasttech.edu.... My majors are business administration and financial services. "The current system uses standardized test to measure student's learning. This system is flawed in a lot of aspects. Standardized test tend to fail to teach critical thinking:" There is evidence that standardized tests fail to meet all of the desired affects. However, the standardized tests are also important in how schools get their accreditation and endowments. The government requires test scores to work with to make these judgments in performance. The idea of eliminating tests is in its infancy and would be extremely and unnecessarily risky to make the leap to eliminate standardized tests from our education system. Finland has seemingly successfully done this in their public schools, but that system would be impossible to apply to the United States conventionally. Project-based curriculum is a new idea that is being done today in some schools. There is one such high school in the city where I live and it is moderately successful but not significantly compared to their test-based counterparts. I agree with you that critical thinking is better taught in a project-based curriculum, but it would be very difficult if not impossible to successfully make such a transition and could lead to other issues that we will debate out later like we are now. In regard of your hechingerreport article there are many aspects that it brings forward. While a project-based curriculum may solve some of the issue you have to consider that it may bring with it other issues. There are many reasons that could explain why students are not learning important critical thinking and "higher-order" thinking skills. While the method in which it is being taught be a part of it, I believe the larger part of the issue is our relaxed culture that many (if not most) students take part in. Many people simply do not take their studies seriously enough and changing the learning style may not necessarily solve that problem. "In addition, the current system tend to teach students to memorize and also pushes teachers to teach to the test rather than teaching the knowledge." I believe this to be more of a teacher issue. If the teacher is unmotivated, lacking in enthusiasm, or simply unknowledgeable they will simply take the easy way out and just teach the test. There are other issues as well in some schools where they are desperate to get their accreditation so they will just purely teach the test to their students. That happened in schools in Atlanta, GA and some other places. That is only an issue with K-12 schools, not in colleges or universities. I have never seen the issue of unskilled instructors or professors in my college so I have always managed to learn and retain information quite effectively from my courses. Colleges usually only hire instructors who are not only educationally qualified but are also extensively experienced in their field so they truly know what they are teaching and are probably enthusiastic about it. " It is indeed hard to find new examples of hands-on learning for some classes, but we have to face the fact that some studies have been done. When schools have the chance, they can just replicate the study and have the students as the participants in an experiment. This in itself will help students to learn so much rather as they experience it rather than just listening to people. It is also to possible to create a scenario and have students act it out and respond based on what they have learned." There are issues with applying hands-on learning at the college level. Many students can find many activities to be trivial and quickly lose interest (I experienced that a few times), focusing on making the activities fun can actually hamper learning, failing to reflect on activities academically (usually in a lecture) ultimately makes the whole activity educationally pointless, and many abstract topics simply does not invite the idea of activities. Source: http://www.educationspace360.com... I hope you get back in time to respond in this round!

Title: Standardized Tests are Ideal for College Admission Content: So first I'd like to lay out my main arguments: [some form 1]1. Uniformity2. Fairness3. Direction / GuidanceOne thing that I would like to clarify before establishing my points is that I do not claim that standardized test are the best in each of those sub categories. I claim that they are the best overall option, and choose to emphasise these aspects if Con chooses not to prove some other aspect of greater value. He would also have to provide a way to achieve it, and if it wasn't obvious it has to be something achievable as observing the life of each applicant from birth to admission is a practical impossibility even though it would provide maximum accuracy or etcetra. For my first point, Standardized Tests provide a level field for all test takers. Developing on the definition I provided earlier, standardized tests are the same for all test takers [2]. This provides a level playing field for all students as it does not change depending on who is taking the test, or where they are, or even how they are. Not using standardized tests would mean that the students are less aware of what they are going to face, and so unable to prepare or feel secure. Having tests that are not standardized would not only make it unpredictable and difficult for students to prepare for these important tests, but also permit inconsistencies that would make it easier for some students, while it is much harder to others. Let me provide a picture of how a lack of uniformity would be detrimental to an average american high school senior. According to Collegeboard, the leading source of collegebound seniors, seniors should apply to about 5 - 8 colleges [3]. Now, let's say each college had their own exams built to their specific interests. I do not deny that this would provide more useful information to the college, but what I do have a problem with is that this will take too much time and effort from the individual student. If the student truly aspires to do something beyond mediocre, he will have to prepare for each individual test so that he may have a good application to each college. This takes a lot of time and effort, and adds a lot more stress to the students who already have to deal with their regular studies. An average high school student has about an hour of homework everyday [4], but this is not accounting for the extracirricular, college classes, sports or other things that students have obligations to. This press release provides support to my claim that most students are involved in extracirrular activites that take even more of their already limited effort and time [5]. In light of this, students would have to study for school, complete their extracirriculor activities, complete their homework, and get adequate rest, before they can start studying for these Standardized tests. That is why a uniform test is better for them, as they do not need to scrutinize different material for each test, but just the general for the general standardized. My Second point is that is is fair. Any other form of non standardized anything will cause inequalities making it easier for some students, while harder for others. This would be like one student recieving 1 + 1, while you are given the question to determine the square root of 49. The problems would be of different levels inevitably and therefore you might just be getting things harder than they should be, while others have it easier. My solution of standardized tests solves this as all students will have the same questions and therefore no student has an advantage over another as they are all presented the same material and asked the same questions. This will make the standard more stable and hence allow you to objectively compare one students result to another with minimal bias. anything non standardized falls to this criticism. Basing this claim off of the very definition of standardized tests [2], as all students recieve the same questions so that their results may be compared with one another, standardized provide a fair method for college admission.My third point is that a standardized test provided guidance. It tells people exactly what they need to study for and therefore allows them to prepare for the test. This allows for the students to get ready and so their results reflect the effort they put in. This goes back again to the stable nature of standardized tests. My second and third point are closelt related but they are two different aspects of the standardized test's stable nature. This point goes back to the point made by the business of high school students as a test that provides guidance will make it easier for the already busy students to study and prepare for them.(Just making sure to clarify, but just to say Standardized tests are inadequate is not enough to win Con the debate, but Con still has to provide a better alternative which is better than my proposition)Sources:1. http://apecsec.org...2. http://edglossary.org...;3. https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org...;4. http://www.theatlantic.com...5. http://www.publicagenda.org...;

Title: Should more or less money be put towards funding for schools Content: Let's respond to my opponent's argument about how education is needed to raise the children of today to become the innovators of tomorrow. I offer the following responses. Firstly, due to an increased emphasis on standardized tests, schools are putting more emphasis on "teaching to the test" rather than important subjects. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (http://www.fairtest.org...) entire subjects may be dropped from curriculum such as social studies and science, because standardized tests mandated under the No Child Left Behind act only contain mathematics and reading comprehension. This omits from the curriculum many important skills, such as writing a research paper or conducting a lab report, both of which are very important if the world wants to solve global warming, as my opponent stated, or any other problem that needs to be solved. But we have to get to the root cause of this narrowed curriculum. What was the cause of the aforementioned harms? The answer is more funding into education. It was the increased funding plans dictated in No Child Left Behind that caused schools to focus so much on standardized testing and to get rid of more important subjects. This is another empirical example of increased funding harming education. Secondly, let's go into a specific part of this argument. My opponent argued that funding is necessary to keep the students' interest in school and without it, the children would get bored and "not pay attention as much as they should". This ties back into the standardized test point, because Michael Hout and Stuart Elliott's book "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education" states the opposite of my opponent's point. They found that when teachers have an obligation or incentive to improve their students' standardized test scores, they use different teaching methods that are disadvantageous to students. They used different strategies such as increased lecturing and directing, which decreased the students' interest and "willingness to undertake difficult academic challenges". It's actually the increase in funding that harms education, not it's lack thereof. Now let's take a look at my opponent's response to my arguments. My opponent says that spending increases actually benefit the poor more than the rich area of New Jersey. However, Kenneth Wesson of the National Association for the Education of Young Children says otherwise. He finds that there is socio-economic discrimination in education and that the poor aren't benefited as much as the rich. Then my opponent says that that we could put more money into a better police force, and crimes would be decreased. However, increasing police funding is not part of our topic, as we are discussing whether education funding should be increased. Finally my opponent declares that in a study beginning in 1955, there have been beneficial impacts of increased education funding. David Klein of California State University Northridge actually explains that in 1955, The College Entrance Examination Board established the Commission on Mathematics. This increased the quality of mathematics classes in all schools across the nation. (http://www.csun.edu...). This is significant because PBS finds that there has been a high rise in the amount of jobs that are considered "technical", or requiring advanced technology. The same source finds math education is a good way to improve the quality of those jobs (http://www.pbs.org...). Then, even if you don't believe a word I said throughout this argument, my opponent has not responded to my tradeoff argument. Thus, all my impacts still stand and have weight in this round. Because we are weighing this debate on a utilitarian framework and my opponent has not responded to this, we have to look to which side can benefit more people. Even if you think that an increase in spending would benefit every single student in the nation, you're still not benefiting as many people as the CON side. Through this argument, I prove that by not increasing education funding, mortality is being prevented in the nation, and even greater, this is preventing 50 million people from going into extreme poverty and over 200 million people being pushed near starvation. Because I can prove benefit to more people, I should be winning this round. Thank you.

Title: Standardized Testing Content: Standardized testing should continue to exist in schools. 1. It prepares students for future jobs: To land many jobs and be able to apply, (ie. lawyers, pilots etc.) standardized tests need to be taken to get such jobs. Teaching students from an early age how to handle them will help them for the future. 2. It is a non-discriminatory and fair way of testing: No racism, sexism etc. can be found with grading these kinds of tests because most of them are multiple choice and for the written sections, the graders do not know the students whom are being graded. This avoids bias and overall makes testing more fair for students to measure academic knowledge. 3. "Teaching to the test" may not be a bad thing: You may make the argument that teachers "teach to the test" and ignore crucial concepts just to cover all the test material in time. This is false, for all teachers do not know what is on such tests to prepare their students for them. They just follow the core curriculum. It helps teachers and students "focus on essential content," and "eliminates time wasting activities which prevent students from excelling." 4. It does not "narrow" curriculum: It simply just focuses on more essential topics to succeed. 5. Most parents approve of these tests: "A June-July 2013 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 75% of parents say standardized tests "are a solid measure of their children's abilities" and 69% say the tests "are a good measure of the schools' quality." 93% of parents say standardized tests "should be used to identify areas where students need extra help" and 61% say their children "take an appropriate number of standardized tests." ~This quote is self-explanatory. 6. Most students approve, and are not "overly-stressed:" Most students have a positive view towards such testing. And approximately 75% of students support the test and believe it is fair, according to a 2006 country-wide survey. 7. Non-expensive: It only costs $2-5 per student, which is a small amount compared to buying other materials for schools. ie. textbooks, computers etc. Taxes pay for this for public schools. 8. Most teachers and administrators approve of such tests: 9. Unbiased grading: Once again, since the teacher of the students are not grading the tests, bias is removed. 10. It prepares students for the future: Not only jobs, it challenges students to comply with more demanding college work. Sources: http://standardizedtests.procon.org...

Title: No Child Left Behind motivates unfortunate "teaching to the test": Content: The focus on standardized testing (all students in a state take the same test under the same conditions) as the means of assessment encourages teachers to teach a narrow subset of skills that will increase test performance rather than focus on deeper understanding and life lessons that can be applied in the marketplace, real life, and to citizenship and democracy generally. Because teachers and schools may be punished if they fail to live up to standardized test score goals, they often have a perverse incentive to focus almost entirely on teaching to the test, especially where a school is at risk of being designated as "failing".

Title: Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States Content: The purpose of education has evolved over time. However, no where in the discussion does standardized testing seem to promote the goals of education. "The one continuing purpose of education, since ancient times, has been to bring people to as full a realization as possible of what it is to be a human being. Other statements of educational purpose have also been widely accepted: to develop the intellect, to serve social needs, to contribute to the economy, to create an effective work force, to prepare students for a job or career, to promote a particular social or political system. These purposes offered are undesirably limited in scope, and in some instances they conflict with the broad purpose I have indicated; they imply a distorted human existence. The broader humanistic purpose includes all of them, and goes beyond them, for it seeks to encompass all the dimensions of human experience. "Arthur W. Foshay, The Curriculum Matrix: Transcendence and Mathematics," Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 1991 "[The purpose of education] has changed from that of producing a literate society to that of producing a learning society." "Margaret Ammons, Associate Secretary of ASCD, Purpose and Program: How Does Commitment Today Differ from That in Other Periods, Educational Leadership, October 1964 "The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals. We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character"that is the goal of true education." "Martin Luther King Jr., speech at Morehouse College, 1948 (http://www.ascd.org...) It seems that the only ad coming off the pro is a uniform system of testing. In no way can we establish any sort of syllogism that connotes that uniformity leads to and increase in critical and moral thinking. For that reason we must reject the advocacy for tests and the notion that standardized testing is beneficial in the United States. On record, Standardized tests promote racial bias and promote conformity rather than ingenuity. Conformity stifles the ability for society to learn what it means to be a collective human race. Standardized tests undermine the purpose of our educational system and must be rejected.

Title: Resolved: Standardized test scores accurately reflect the academic value of students. Content: I thank my oppenent for a great debate and a timely response. 1. Here we are agin debating the same thing in contention 1. My opponent does not undertsand/or cannot comprehend my first point. Although to him there is no reason for results to change if a student knows the material there is and I have already given evidence to support this. Perhaps re-stating it will help my opponent realizing regardless of his take on it the actuall results prove me correct: National Center for Fair Testing -"A test is completely reliable if you would get exactly the same results the second time you administered it. All existing tests have "measurement error. " This means an individual's score may vary from day to day due to testing conditions or the test-taker's mental or emotional state. As a result, many individual's scores are frequently wrong. " I hope this has helped my opponent understand and realize that I am correct. 2. "The Luck Factor" my opponent has repeatedly said that even if a student guess's correctly he needed to know some information. This is not inherently true. Even if a student closes his eyes and randomly circles A, B, C, or D there is a large 25% chance he will get the question right regardless of what he knew or if he made an "Educated guess" (which like I said earlier is still just a guess). I am not saying that students are going through tests guessing on every problem getting every one correct, but with such a high chance of getting one right if you do guess makes them unrealiable. 3. Pressure, again another point my opponent has not understood through the entirity of this debate. My opponent said: "I don't know what to say but we cannot just stop the tradtion and excellence of standardized testing for a handful of students who most of the time get through pressure with some counseling and help. " the debate is not to stop standardized testing but wether or not it accurately represent's a student's academic values. It is more than just a "handful" of students who do poorly under pressure. With so much on the line in standardized tests pressure and nerves are actually quite common. For some students there nerves get the best of them causing them to do poorly on the tests. To corrolate this with the resolution so my opponent can better undertsand: Pressure created by the importance and atmosphere of the test causes students to overthink questions causing them to get them wrong or "choke" under pressure. The tests are not really becuase in the cases of certain students the pressure they create is to much and the students un up doing poorly although they may have known the material thus giving an inaccurate representation. 4. My opponent has said that standardized testing can be used to determine areas that students need help in. In response I say the following: This is untrue, standardized testing can give many false readings. There are simply too many variables behing the score recieved on a standardized test to use it in order to judge areas that a student needs help on.

Title: Standardised testing should not be abolished. Content: I will now proceed to my arguments. C1) QuantifiabilityOne of the biggest advantages of standardised testing is quantifiability. By definition, standardised tests are scored in a consistent manner, and all test-takers are required to complete the same questions. Thus the ability of individual students, classes, schools and districts can be objectively measured against averages in the class, school, district or nation. Such a measure is needed for numerous purposes, all of which have great importance. Abolishing standardised tests is thus not desirable. I will elaborate under two headings below. SC1) Quantifying knowledge and abilityAn important purpose of standardised testing is to gauge students' knowledge and ability. Schools can use this measure to decide how to allocate resources to facilitate teaching. For example, supplementary lessons and homework can be given to low achievers, and classes can be formed according to ability, so there are fewer discrepancies in each class and teachers can teach more effectively, focusing on basic knowledge when teaching lower achievers and speeding to more advanced concepts when teaching more capable students. Abolishing standardised testing makes this type of assessment much harder to carry out. The measure is also essential for university entrance. For example, in Hong Kong, our universities select students through the JUPAS system. Students' results in the HKDSE, a comprehensive standardised test, are sent to universities through the system. Individual faculties or departments will then weigh the students' scores with a formula (for example, a science faculty might allocate greater weight to Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology). It would be unthinkable to abolish the HKDSE, or the universities will no longer have any objective criterion on which to assess applicants. Dr Richard P. Phelps, an expert on standardised testing, noted that abolishing standardised testing will lead to 'large-scale institution of remedial programs in colleges to compensate for any deficiencies of instruction in elementary and secondary schools'. (4)SC2) Quantifying the effectiveness of teachingStandardised tests measure teaching prowess. Parents choosing schools for their children, for example, can rely on these objective statistics to choose a school who will likely improve their children's academic performance. This also motivates schools to improve their examination results. If they improve them, capable students will be more likely to choose their school, further boosting their results. This creates a virtuous circle. Statistics from standardised tests are also important for policy planning. Governments can use these stats to determine the relative success of different schools so as to formulate strategies to improve pedagogy. For example, if it's found that a school scoring high in maths adopted a certain strategy, the government can introduce it to other schools. Schools can also use these results to assess the teaching prowess of their teachers. If some teachers are found to be incompetent or lazy, the school can urge them to improve accordingly (such as by providing training courses or threatening demotion if no improvement is shown). As you can see from the above, scores from standardised tests are a good way to measure the effectiveness of pedagogy. Thus they should not be done away with. C2) FairnessStandardised tests are fair because objective criteria are used to assess performance. Multiple-choice questions are generally marked using a scanner and computer. For DBQs and essay-type questions, marking schemes are fixed and usually rigid, so the risk of bias, favouritism and subjective interpretation is minimised. For example, a teacher cannot give a student a lower grade because of s/he does not agree with what the student wrote, as long as the student provided most of the points in the marking scheme. The majority of students agree: 79% found the questions in standardised testing 'fair', according to a 2006 study. (3) Should we abolish standardised testing, we would have to rely on grades given by teachers, which is very problematic. According to research, teachers often consider factors other than competence when they grade students, including 'student participation, perceived effort, progress over the period of the course, and comportment'. (4) Moreover, all students face the same questions and are put on the same curve. Without standardised testing, we can only use a student's internal results to measure his performance. However, this is not fair as many schools may thus inflate students' scores to improve their chances of success, such as by using easier test questions. Also, if a school is weak in a particular area, say English, then it will be much easier to score an A in English in that school. This is unfair to students studying in schools that are great at English. Therefore, a standardised approach is the only fair method to assess students, and standardised tests should not be abolished. C3) Increased motivationSC1) Teachers' motivationTeachers may feel accomplished if their classes have superior results in standardised tests, and shame if their classes do worse than average. I'll give an admittedly anectodal example for illustration purposes only. More than a decade ago, the classes of one of my teachers did very badly in the former HKCEE examination. The principle shamed him in front of all the teachers, declaring an explanation. Since that year, he has worked very hard to improve his teaching methods, prepare better notes and even to arrangd all the past test questions by topic for students for drilling. This greatly boosted his students' results; at one time, 30% got an A and 80% got Credit or above. To this day, he remains one of the most popular teachers because of his dedication towards teaching. Standardised tests motivate teachers to improve teaching methods, and their abolition would remove this pressure on teachers. Thus they should not be abolished. SC2) Students' motivationMeasuring students' abilities motivates them to improve these abilities. Economist Dan Ariely said, 'If we want to change what they care about, we should change what we measure. ' (1) If students know their ability will be assessed, they will have greater impetus to work hard and succeed in these tests. Standardised tests give students a clear goal as to what they want to achieve and what they should do to achieve it:-There is a clearly defined curriculum that determines what will and won't be tested. There are fewer worries that they will be tested on material they have not prepared for. -Question types are more or less fixed, so students can drill themselves on the common question types to achieve greater gain in the test. In a non-standardised test, however, this is not possible; they may have to complete questions of a type they have never tried before. -Past papers are generally available, so students can easily familiarise themselves with the types of questions they will come across, the most commonly tested material, how their work will be marked and so on. For example, according to rubrics from past papers, the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority believes that unemployment has three costs: increase in crime rate, loss of skills and loss of output; the cost of retraining workers is explicitly excluded. Were the test not standardised, we wouldn't be sure if the cost of retraining workers is a cost of unemployment. Thanks to standardised testing and past papers, we can be sure. A clear curriculum, fixed question types and past papers allow students to achieve a good grade more easily than in a non-standardised test, where there are many variables they cannot predict before taking the test (including the question types, materials tested and the acceptability of answers). Therefore, standardised tests grant students, in economic terms, greater returns at lower risk, and thus motivate students to work harder. Statistically, it cannot be denied that standardised testing encourages students to work harder. In fact, 93% of the studies related to standardised testing done in the last 100 years found a positive impact on student achievement as a result of standardised testing. (2) The passing rate of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System rose from 45% in 1999, the year of its introduction, to 67% in 2002. (5) Given this stat, there is no reason for us to abolish standardised testing again. C4) Develop positive attributes like perseverance, diligence, etc. Standardised testing is a good way for students to learn skills, values and attitudes like perseverance and diligence. They often have a large curriculum that involves not only memorisation but also the acqusition of a wide variety of skills and abilities. For example, in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education determines our future. Once we step into Senior Secondary (~high school), we have three years to prepare for this all-important test. This is an important test of our perseverance, diligence, concentration and resilience. Preparing for a high-stakes test is an important life event that allows us to develop these important attributes and prepare ourselves for life after school. (1) . https://www.washingtonpost.com...(2) Richard P. Phelps, "The Effect of Testing on Achievement: Meta-Analyses and Research Summary, 1910–2010,” Nonpartisan Education Review, Apr. 2011 (3) . http://standardizedtests.procon.org...(4) . http://standardizedtests.procon.org...;(5) . http://www.nytimes.com...

Title: Pre-testing in public schools Content: My opponent has not showed my pre-testing is better for public school. He just stands one case study.

Title: student ought not be required to take standerdized exit exams to graduate Content: REBUTTAL: 1) In my first point, I presented 4 arguments against my opponent's supposition that students should have to prove what they learned throughout the year via passing standardized exit exams. These points included: a) Just because someone passes a test does not prove that they have learned anything. They could have cheated on the test; gotten lucky with multiple choice answers; guessed; or memorized the material but not have actually LEARNED the material. Con suggests that cheating is unlikely, and that learning how to pass standardized tests is actually a skill that one should have to learn. I fail to see the merit of these arguments. First, just because cheating may be unlikely does not mean that it does not occur, thus the real issue here is not being addressed - simply pushed to the side and dismissed. Second, if standardized tests to judge competence are eliminated in general, then this point is null and void considering that there would then be no need to acquire this skill. Moreover, claiming that it should be a skill does not argue on behalf of the concept of the test in and of itself. b) There are various forms of intelligence and methods of learning. Most standardized tests don't measure improvement, or the overall education one has received. Con responded, "As long as students learn the information and the material they need for the course, it doesn't matter in what way they learned it. .. There is no way for the teachers to know what is on the test, so all the information will be conveyed and a general idea of it will be put on the test. " I disagree. There are courses specifically designed to teach you how to pass a test using logical deduction of multiple choice answers. I believe that memorizing a way to BEAT the test instead of PASS the test using your own knowledge is a flawed system. Additionally, Con has ignored my argument that there are various forms of intelligence (which most standardized tests completely ignore) and learning or demonstrating that intelligence. c) Certain students perform better on standardized tests than others. Just because someone might not do well on a standardized test doesn't necessarily mean that they haven't learned the material. Con's response to this point was that it was an irrelevant one considering that you usually only have to pass the test with 70% correct answers. This is irrelevant. My point is that some people are bad test takers in general, meaning even if they know 90% of the answers on the test, they may always score significantly lower due to other factors. My point has been ignored. 2) While Con notes that people who pass standardized tests make 2x as much money as those who don't, you'll note that this is not a cited study nor is a source included to prove this point, thus suggesting that we should eliminate this factoid all together. Moreover, simply because one makes more money does not necessarily mean that they are happier or even smarter, so again, I fail to see how this is relevant. Then Con adds, "When I say that not all tests are written on paper and I believe that those are the hardest tests, I mean that they are the hardest - not the most important. My opponent has agreed that people are tested throughout their lives so this rebuttal is obsolete. " Actually, I fail to see how my rebuttal was obsolete. I merely pointed out that (a) People are not given standardized tests in the real world, and (b) Con didn't prove how people's lives were made better as a result of being forced to take standardized tests, so I don't see how these tests have a long-term effect in improving one's life or helping them in the future. These points stand. DEFENSE OF ARGUMENTS: 1) I challenged Con's values and criterion in this debate: a) What does forcing students into taking standardized tests have to do with universal rights? Con said, "By passing these tests, it proves that you are ready for society and ready to be given more opportunities and more rights. " This is a gross misrepresentation of what rights are. Rights are not something that you are earn or acquire. Rights are something that you are BORN with. Also, opportunities and rights are NOT the same thing. b) Why do people need to take these tests to be free? Con ignored this question. c) I don't see how "the ends justify the means" in Con's argument considering that Con hasn't shown how these tests actually benefit the student. Con's response was, "Teleology is the end effect determines the means. I am saying that no madder how you learn the knowledge, as long as you learn it you should be able to pass the test. " Lol. .. madder. Anyway, I have already argued against this point numerous times. Just because you pass the test does not mean that you have actually learned the material. Period. 2) Regarding test performance, I again reiterated that not everybody performs well on tests regardless of whether they know the material or not. I also pointed out that some people have learning disabilities or anxiety, both of which will affect a student's performance. I submitted that because there was no way to ensure that the test taking process would be fair for everyone, then it was not a good judge of who should be eligible to graduate and who shouldn't. Con responded simply by stating that these tests worked around those with disabilities. He said nothing about the anxiety problems, mind you, but consider that my point was actually that by giving some students a test extension, it actually might be giving an unfair ADVANTAGE to them over the other students despite their learning disability (because there is no feasible or accurate way to measure each and every disability against the test). Moreover, just because someone might have more time to complete a test doesn't necessarily mean that the test works around the student's disability. 3) I've noted that preparing for these exit exams usually discourages teachers and school boards from focusing on other aspects of education. Con has consistently responded by saying that this doesn't matter - that passing the test is the most important thing, and the best way to determine intelligence and capabilities. However, note that he failed to respond to my point that there are various types of intelligence. By demanding that these tests be passed in order to graduate, you're promoting only certain aspects of knowledge which is unfair to the students and society as a whole, and that these tests are often discriminatory against those who are intelligent in ways beyond the test and which the test does not take into consideration. 4) Regarding alternatives, I presented the idea that if one does not pass a standardized exam, but their grades and class performance show a considerable degree of knowledge in the expected fields, then a system ought to be set up where educators or administrators can offer or allow other ways for the student to demonstrate what they've learned. Con simply said that anyone who knows the material should be able to pass the test, and did not even take the option of alternatives into consideration! 5) I presented a CITED source that showed those who are required to pass these exit exams do no better in the workforce than those who aren't required to pass these tests. As such, they don't seem to add any relative value to one's life or production in society. 6) To respond to my argument that these tests are expensive and not worth it in terms of a cost benefit analysis, Con says that these tests only cost the STATE money and not the districts, so it's no big deal. Wrong. The people who live in districts pay taxes to the state! Additionally, even if a school does bad on a test, it doesn't mean that they will stop receiving funding. In fact, they might receive MORE funding because of it.

Title: Resolved: Standardized test scores accurately reflect the academic value of students. Content: 1. Standardized test scores are just unconsistant I don't know how many other ways I can say this inorder for my opponent to undertsand. If a student takes 4 different tests he will get four different results. I can see why my opponent would think otherwise but he is mistaken. I have already met the burden of proof by providng a quote from an organization that strives to make tests fair that agrees with me. 2. As far as the luck factor goes my opponent's responses have changed throughout this debate. At frist he said something about educated guesses and now he is saying something about how "they can't guess throughout the entire test". I concur that the chances of a student being able to guess through an entire test are low however the fact that it is still easy to guess correctly on a handful ruins the test accuracy. The following hypothetical should explain it all: You do not pass a standardized test becuase you got 1 question wrong and now you must go to summer school. The guy next to you passed becuase he "got lucky" and guessed right. Asside from the test your grades were better than this students but becuase of a lucky guess you know have to go through summer school and he does not. 3. My opponent keeps saying that if you know the material there is no reason to feel nervous. My opponent may feel this way about tests that he has taken but that is his own oppinion. Many students who do know the material well still test poorly just becuase there nervous. I agree that perhaps this is silly of them but never the less it occurs and affects their score negatively. 4. My opponents last point has fluctated through the coarse of this debate but I undertsand it to be: "Standardized tests can help determine what areas a student needs help in. " I disagree entirely. There are simply too many variables that affect a students score to think that a standardized test could be used as any sort of judgment tool. Suppose a student who does know the material well is going through tough times at home this will greatly affect his score merely becuase he is psyhcologically unstable at the moment. Let us not judge students academically through 1 test but through what they have demonstrated through out the year.

Title: Children Should Have The Right To Vote In Elections Content: The education system will be improved.

Title: Standardized Tests are skewed in favour of the wealthy Content: Standardized tests are inherently skewed in favour of high-income students. Tutoring is and industry unto itself and the resulting rise in scores among high income students skews the scale against students whose families cannot afford it. By contrast, even if the money is available, the impact that tutoring can have on a student’s academic performance is limited. A tutor cannot write papers or take tests for them, and nor can they answer questions in class, or participate in sports or other extracurricular activities. As a consequence, eliminating easily tutored standardized tests helps even the playing field between richer and poorer students.