Each year, the juniors at Edmond Memorial High School are required to participate in state testing. In fact, all of Oklahoma is required to do so. From third to eighth grade, students take the Oklahoma School Testing Program test, and in eleventh grade, they take the College- and Career-Readiness Assessments. But, is Oklahoma State Testing really necessary?
In elementary schools, students are required to take the state test in third through fifth grade. It does seem necessary to understand how well each child is doing, and the scores inform teachers and parents on whether or not the student needs to be held back. However, some young students have short attention spans when testing. Especially as technology is being used more and more with testing, some kids may even just skip through the questions randomly when they realize that the “next” button will simply make the question go away. So, the tests cannot always be reliable as accurate representations of the students’ knowledge.
But, as students advance to high school, state testing is still required at some points. As mentioned, the juniors are required to take the CCRA. This includes science and US history testing, as well as a required ACT test. However, as the end of the school year approaches, with more and more amounts of state testing, ACTs, SATs, mock-AP exams, and AP exams themselves, students are beginning to feel a little overloaded.
Because the required ACT is set during the school day for all juniors, most of their teachers will understandably be less focused on school work for that day. However, state testing is also set during the school days but generally takes, at most, three hours. Unfortunately, because not all of the juniors test at once, each eleventh-grade student ends up missing a portion of their class time, which is especially detrimental as finals and AP tests are approaching, and many students would appreciate the review time.
If state testing is required for high school juniors as a representation of the school’s “report card,” should it really take away from the students’ class time, especially as the end-of-year academics grow more intense? As noted, several students grow impatient with the testing, and they often click through the test quickly. This leads to a misrepresentation of the school’s “report card” and hurts the students’ opportunities for learning. Instead, Oklahoma schools should find a way to include a happy medium, with something similar to the required ACT: a day strictly set for testing, without any rush or stress to return to class.
Contact Esther Wood at [email protected]
