To Test or Not To Test?

Testing has been and always will be a major part of assessment in the classroom. Growing up I was never a great test taker-I was decent-but not great. Prior to attending catholic school, when I was in public school, I was in the 98 percent tile of the standardize test scores. when my parents moved me to catholic school my grades dropped drastically. My teacher from the public school always told my mom I was best suited for the public schools system and that I would thrive, whereas my sister would do better in a catholic school. I'm not sure if i even understand this myself but I guess she knew what she was talking about because I only attend a public school once more throughout all of my schooling and again when I was in the public school I did excellent. Nowadays I am in a catholic college, but this time my grades are great and I work hard to maintain my G.P.A. Does the school really have something to do with how a child academically succeeds? I'm not sure if it has something to do with the school, as it would with the teacher.

Since I never liked to take tests and never felt I could show my full potential and understanding, I was not a fan of tests and always had a stigma against them. I feel schools place too much emphasis on the tests rather than other material that could be counted or taken in place of tests. I am not saying that we should get rid of tests altogether, but I do think we need more forms of assessment than just tests.

There are several kinds of tests: essay based tests and multiple choice based tests. each subject requires different kinds of test formats. Essay based tests are a great way, in my opinion, to let the students fully explain their knowledge and comprehension of that subject/topic, and I would rather have an essay formatted test. Multiple choice based tests can go in many directions: they can either really give you the lead way because of the various choices or they could really confuse you and turn out to be worse than any other kind of test. I look at a multiple choice test in these ways: 1. if you are stumped, you have several other choices to narrow the answer down to, or secondly, if you really know the material but when you see other choice answers you begin to second guess yourself and a test you studied for hours for and were confident you would get a passing grade can turn to be a disaster.

I think tests are important to keep in the curriculum but to make some modifications to the types of tests given and to make sure they are related to the subject the educator is testing the students on.