[intro music] (host) Do standardized tests And is the U.S. actually overtesting?

By now, we've all heard the refrain that one of the biggest issues with the current state of education in the U.S. is overtesting.

And on top of sometimes dominating course curriculum, standardized tests can often provoke anxiety, anger, and stress regardless of how they're used.

Even though standardized tests may seem as American as A, a maple leaf, B, apple pie, C, soccer, or D, all of the above, the question still remains-- Do standardized tests do more harm than good for students?

So, sharpen your pencils and get ready for a whole lot of bad test jokes, because we're about to dive pretty deep into the world of tests.

And to answer this big question, first we have to ask: Exactly how many standardized tests are U.S. students taking each year?

A 2015 article from the Washington Post drawing on data from the Council of Great City Schools reports that, on average, students from 66 major urban schools in the U.S. take 112 mandated standardized tests between pre-K and 12th grade.

Eighth graders in that set tended to average the highest number of hours for mandated exams, weighing in at 25.3 hours in the hot seat over the course of the school year.

And students as young as pre-K took approximately four standardized tests.

So, even those little baby hands are hard at work choosing answers and filling in the blanks, but keep in mind, this doesn't consider the number of hours educators need to prep students for the tests, which takes considerable time away from the mandated curriculum.

As a result, the Department of Education issued action plans in 2015 and '16 to reduce the amount of standardized testing in order to focus more attention on the quality of the tests and what exactly they were measuring.

They also suggested that the percentage of class time spent on standardized testing should be capped at 2%.

Okay, so we got a quick rundown on how many tests some students nationwide are taking every year, and it's quite a lot, but that brings us to our next question: What are the origins of standardized testing in the U.S., and what was their purpose?

According to the National Education Association, testing in the U.S. started to change between 1840 and 1875.

That's when schools began to shift their mission from educating primarily the wealthy elites to educating bigger swathes of the population.

This shift was also marked by a gravitation towards written testing instead of the old standard of oral examinations.

But 19th century educators were starting to see if there were ways to measure student performance for the purposes of college admissions and subject placement.

In 1890, Harvard's president Charles William Eliot proposed a common entrance exam for colleges, and in 1900, the College Entrance Examination Board, who you most likely know as the folks who administer the SAT, was established, administering their first subject exams in 1901.

The U.S. Army's use of certain aptitude tests during World War I also helped to inspire the spread of the use of standardized tests in schools.

And in 1926, the first SAT was administered.

Then, in 1935, the first high-speed computers were used to process tests across the country, which greatly reduced the costs of grading and administering them, which meant that now schools could administer more tests, more often.

Since then, there have been a variety of initiatives and government programs to oversee the administration of tests nationwide.

So, stressed students and school administrators today can trace the test craze back into the 19th century.

But, although the data I cited earlier makes it obvious that American students take a lot of tests, that doesn't mean it's inherently bad or harmful to students.

So, what if these tests work?

Or what if we're testing students in the U.S. on average to other peer systems?

So, to tackle this idea, it's important to find some more data points and ask, How does the U.S. compare internationally with countries that test at higher and lower rates?

So, in order to ask this question, I wanted to look at some information on how U.S. students, as a whole, measure up internationally against others, and then see what those countries' policies on standardized testing are.

So, since we started with numbers from 2015, I also checked out the Pew Research Center's published findings from the 2015 PISA, or Program for International Student Assessment exams.

The exam is administered every three years and measures reading ability, math, and science proficiency in 15-year-olds around the world, among other skills.

And those findings show that of the 72 countries that participated, the U.S. ranked 40th in math, 25th in science, and 24th in reading.

And in the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. ranked 31st in math and 19th in science.

But before I make one too many jokes about a test acronym that brings to mind the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I started to look at nations that ranked higher than the U.S. with different relationships to testing.

The first would be the oft-cited example of Finland, which issues significantly fewer standardized tests than the U.S., and the other would be South Korea, where students are tested at a more rigorous rate than students in the U.S., at least in terms of the difficulty of the exams and the significance placed on testing scores.

So, let's start with Finland.

In the same PISA scores from 2015, Finland ranked 5th in science, 11th in math, and 4th in reading, with PISA ranking all three of these scores as being significantly higher than U.S. students.

And this trend, being near the top of the pack, has been relatively consistent for the nation at least going back to its 2010 PISA scores.

As I mentioned back in our episode on "Why Do We Get Grades in School?"

Finland has a significantly lower rate of standardized testing when compared with the U.S.

So, instead of the approximately 112 mandatory exams that students in urban schools were taking between pre-K and 12th grade, the Finnish equivalent is one standardized test.

Yeah, you heard me right-- one mandatory standardized test.

But before we start a rousing refrain of "One is the Loneliest Number," let's see how students and teachers in Finland respond to the lower testing rates.

Their one mandatory test isn't taken is rounding the corner at the end of high school.

Instead, there's a greater focus on teacher and student interaction and improving the classroom experience.

Also of note is that Finland largely does not have private schools and public schools are funded relatively equally, unlike the U.S. where there are a plethora of high schools and even elementary schools with price tags comparable to colleges.

And schools can have vastly disparate budgets based on local taxes.

Although, on average, Finland isn't spending more per student than the U.S. On the other hand, South Korea mirrors much of Finland's success in student outcomes with a higher high-school graduation rate and better college placement rates than the U.S., with a whopping 70% of students enrolling in college.

And if you thought that kids in the U.S. who took oodles of SAT and ACT prep courses in high school were being stretched to the limit, it doesn't compare to their South Korean peers, where some reports show that children are gearing up for their important college-entrance exams as early as elementary school.

Students are encouraged to take private lessons and extra classes to keep up in the highly competitive college-placement stakes, with some low-income families spending up 1/3 of their incomes on education expenses to help children place well.

The tests are mandatory to move on to college and extremely high-pressure, so even though the test is only one day, much of the focus of students' schooling revolves around preparing for the college scholastic aptitude test, even as early as kindergarten.

And South Korean students are also scoring well, not only on the national exams, but are outperforming their U.S. peers on PISA.

In 2015, they ranked 10th in science, 6th in math, and 7th in reading-- all scores the Pew marked as significantly better than the U.S.

But while some have praised South Korea and Finland's outcomes, citing their stellar scores, job placements, high high-school graduation rates, and university enrollments, others note that the size of the student populations in these two countries are fairly small, with more homogenous populations.

And the U.S., on the other hand, is spread across 50 states with differing economic circumstances and greater diversity.

Also, even though South Korean students perform better than their U.S. counterparts, there have also been high suicide rates in students age 17 to 24 who don't perform well on these tests because they can determine so much of their future.

So, how does it all add up?

So, it seems that a lot of questions around whether standardized tests do more harm than good center not only on the frequence of the testing but also the importance placed on the tests themselves and how influential the results of a certain exam are on a student's future success in life.

In the U.S. we test often.

But critics note that the testing is sometimes scattershot without a clear objective.

So rather than using tests to determine student progress, the myriad of mandated exams draw students and teachers away from time spent on other lesson plans.

So, overusing standardized tests is a big issue, but so is forcing students to place too much importance on a test in determining their future prospects.

What do you think?

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