Testing has many uses, but more failures. Taking a test is not an accurate way to measure what students learn throughout the school year. Many things cause the decrease in accuracy, things like test anxiety, cheating and the way tests are weighed. Test anxiety affects many students and can make it harder to learn the material. The lack of learning can also cause more students to cheat on their tests and assignments because they haven’t properly learned enough to pass. How much a test weighs on your grade can be another motive that causes more students to fail their tests. There is a lot of pressure knowing that tests hold the majority of your grade, and it adds to the stress and can lead to cheating.
We’ve all had those days where class after class is announcing tests and quizzes. They stack up and it makes it feel impossible to ever get through the week. While the purpose of tests makes sense, to see if we as students are actually learning anything, the downsides outweigh the positives. Tests truly cause more harm than good. Students will spend more time panicking over their test than actually being able to remember the material. There’s another issue right there, if you can just memorize the material you can pass the test. It’s not an effective way to gauge how much students are learning. All the anxiety and stress that comes with tests can also hinder how a student does on the test. Some people know the material well but they do terrible on tests purely because there is too much stress on them.
There’s also the issue of cheating. Someone is always bound to cheat on a test, which is highly unfair to the students who actually try and do their best on the tests. One student will ace the test, just because they cheated. While the other student gets a worse grade because they actually tried to do it themselves. The latter student likely knows the material better than the student who opted to cheat.
While tests can be stressful and not properly show what students are learning, they’re still proving some use. There can be ways to lessen the stress of testing including teaching students text anxiety coping skills. If students can have more or better ways to study for their tests, it might remove some of the stress. Also if the pressure of how a test is the majority of your grade wasn’t such an issue, perhaps that could help the anxiety go down and let kids truly show what they’ve learned. Even taking a giant test and instead splitting it into smaller tests would prove to be effective.