Standardized testing is something we have all experienced. According to an article written by the Washington Post back in 2015, the average student in America’s public school’s “takes some 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-k and the end of 12th grade.” But what does all the testing result in? Are standardized tests even reliable to measure one’s growth?

Standardized tests only show one’s ability to memorize information and relay it back. With these tests, one simply just becomes a barcode with a name, and everything else is lost. A big issue with these tests is that now teachers are forced to only teach material that the student’s will be tested on. We no longer focus on topics that students could be interested or passionate about, but only topics that will be on tests. This is an unfair advantage to both the teachers and students, because not only do teachers start to feel stressed on having to make sure the students retain what they’re supposed to, but students become stressed with the pressure on having to memorize the information. The result is the students becoming unengaged in the material they are learning at school.

Luckily, some realize these disadvantages of standardized testing, like our state’s governor, Jay Inslee, who signed a measure into office on June 30th. This resulted in high school students no longer needing to pass the Biology EOC, which is good news for every high school student in Washington state. The goal of this new legislation is to give students more flexibility when meeting their graduation requirements.

This is a great step forward in hopefully improving and possibly removing standardized testing