Disadvantages of Traditional/Standardized Assessment
What makes things worst is that traditional test uses school to function as a sorting centre. School sorts those who would work in factories and those who would go to college. Such early streaming will be a disadvantage to late bloomers or to those whose capability do not translate through pen and paper assessments. Such early assessment that detect individual differences in achievement among students is indeed discriminatory. What worsen the situation is that educational practitioners abdicated responsibility for understanding or conducting assessments in schools, leaving it to test and textbook publishers to develop ‘scientifically precise’ assessment tools. Relinquishing such responsibility will cause disparity between instructions and assessments. We should lessen the gap when it comes to functional differentiation: teachers would teach, we decided and assessors would assess. Assessment and instruction should not be separated from one another and it is about time educators take over and be actively involve in assessment. Educators should intervene and take over from the assessment community which launched an unprecedented program of psychometric research and development that has lasted throughout the era which are becoming complex and technically intricate unfathomable by teachers and administrators which create more distance between assessment and instruction.
If we observe closely, traditional testing is centralized for efficiency (Stiggins, 1991) and not having the students’ growth in mind. For students, increasing pressure to score high on tests, combined with a lack of focused opportunities to learn, can lead to a sense of futility and a feeling of hopelessness that can cause them to stop caring and stop trying. For many of them, consistent evidence of poor performance repeatedly reported to their families can result in a profound and long-lasting loss of confidence. Those who stop believing that they are capable of learning will stop trying. Those who stop trying will stop learning. Surely this will be undesirable especially when assessment is very important in the education system (Stiggins 1999).
As standardized tests have been largely used, there are complaints about them and their validity. We should question whether test results tell us anything of real value. Standardized tests reinforce the belief that literacy should involve the mastery of a set of “autonomous, technical skills unrelated to any meaningful context.” In workplaces, many feel that standardized tests neither adequately assess a worker’s ability to use literacy or math on the job nor assess a worker’s ability to use critical-thinking or problem-solving skills since most standardized tests contain short decontextualized paragraphs written with a content and style similar to textbooks with pre-determined answers and do not reflect the variety and richness of the readings. Knowing how well a student performs on this type of test does not tell us how well the student might handle magazines, novels, newspapers or job-related reading. Standardized tests also exaggerate skill deficits and show that a person cannot solve test items, but won’t reveal the person’s abilities to solve practical problems on the job or at home (Stiggins, 1999).
However, in using standardized tests in a criterion-referenced manner you should:
1. Use tests which are appropriate for adult learners;
2. Use tests covering an appropriate range and level of difficulty;
3. Use tests with sufficient questions at the required level of difficulty;
4. Use tests, or portions of tests, which relate to and reliably measure the skills and competencies needed for the learner’s personal, vocational or educational goals; and
5. Administer the tests without time constraints.
Ontario Ministry of Education and Training 1995
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