Is Standardized Testing Still Measuring What We Think It Measures? A Teacher’s Perspective
It’s mid-April in my third-grade classroom, and the hum of the overworked air conditioner mixes with the scratch of pencil on bubble sheets during our first full practice for state testing. Leo sits in the front row, his faded blue T-Rex hoodie pulled up around his shoulders, twisting the matching dinosaur eraser I gave him for Christmas around and around his thumb. When I lean over to check on him, I see he’s erased the same answer bubble three times, leaving a thin hole in the scrap practice paper. He leans in, voice barely a whisper: “The passage says all T-Rexes hunted alone. But that’s not true—my dad showed me a new study last month that says they hunted in packs. Do I put what the passage says, or what’s right?”
After practice ended, I asked Leo to stay in during recess, and he pulled a beat-up spiral notebook out of his backpack that he’d never shown me before. For three months, he’d been working on his own survey of the local natural history museum’s fossil exhibit: he’d mapped every display, calculated the weight of each displayed bone against the estimated weight of a full grown T-Rex, and written out notes on every new paleontology study he could understand for kids. His calculations were correct, and his reading comprehension was clearly working far above the third grade level. But on that practice question, he would have gotten marked wrong if he’d written what he knew. The test only cared if he could regurgitate what the 200-word passage said, regardless of what he could actually think or do.
That encounter got me thinking, because I’m also the mom of a 10th grader who just got his PSAT scores back last month. My son writes a weekly opinion column for our high school newspaper, and last month he won a regional award for an essay on student lunch debt that was cited by our local school board in a recent vote. But his evidence-based reading and writing score landed in the 62nd percentile. When we pulled up his graded essay response to see what went wrong, we found that the AI grader docked him 20% of his points because he didn’t follow the standard five-paragraph structure it was trained to look for. His argument was more nuanced than the prompt expected, and that worked against him.
We’ve long assumed standardized tests give us a clear, neutral picture of what kids know, how well their school is doing, and how ready they are for the next step. But over 12 years of teaching, I’ve watched that gap widen between the number on the page and the actual kid sitting in front of me. What these tests actually measure now, more than anything else, is how well a kid can guess what the test maker wants them to say, how well they can perform under hours of rigid time pressure, and how much test prep their school or family could afford to give them. Curiosity, critical thinking, the ability to fact-check what you read—those things are actually penalized more often than they’re rewarded.
I don’t have all the answers for fixing testing system wide, but there are small, concrete things parents and teachers can do to keep the test score in perspective, instead of letting it define a kid.
The first thing I tell all my parents is when test scores come home in May, don’t open the envelope and lead with the number. Instead, sit down with your kid first, and ask three specific questions: “Show me one question on the test you were excited to answer,” “What’s one question you thought was silly or unfair,” and “What do you think you did really well on here?” It takes 10 minutes, and it tells you more about how your kid thinks than any composite score ever could. Last year, one of my students got a below basic score, but when we talked, she told me the only question she cared about was the one about horse training, which she got right, and spent 15 minutes telling me about how she trains her family’s pony on weekends. That told me she could connect what she reads to her own life, which is the whole point of reading, after all.
For teachers, I keep a simple manila work folder for each student that’s separate from report cards and testing data. Once a month, I toss in one thing that doesn’t show up on a test: Leo’s dinosaur notebook, a photo of the popsicle stick bridge a kid built that held 15 pounds, a short story a kid wrote about their grandma. It takes 5 minutes a month per class, and when we have parent conferences, I pull that folder out before we talk about test scores, to give everyone a real picture of what the kid can do. Parents can do the same thing at home, too—keep a small box or folder of work your kid is proud of, so when a low score comes in that doesn’t match what you know your kid can do, you have something concrete to point to.
For parents of high schoolers, remember that more than 80% of four-year colleges in the U.S. are test-optional right now. If your kid’s test score is lower than their actual work and grades suggest it should be, you don’t have to submit it. Their GPA, their extracurricular work, their writing samples tell a far more accurate story than any single test score.
After our talk, Leo went back and filled in the bubble that matched what the passage said, even though he knew it was wrong. I gave him an extra sticker for his hand for telling me what he really thought, anyway. I don’t think standardized testing is completely useless—it can flag kids who need extra reading support early, which is helpful. But I’m done treating that one number like it’s the whole story of what a kid can do. There’s still a lot we haven’t figured out about measuring learning fairly, and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. For now, the best we can do is look past the bubble sheet, and look at the kid.
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