Tests 'damaging' to school system

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Summary

The Standard Assessment Test (SAT) has been criticised a lot. Although teachers and schools have been saying it is a bad way to judge a school´s performance on, the government has ignored all the complaints. Now a report has been made by a committee of MP´s which says the teachers and schools are right. It says that the SATs are being used in such a way that it harms children and the school system.

Because the schools and teachers want their pupils to get the highest scores so that more parents will put their child at that school, the teacher decides whether a pupil is ready to go to the next level of education, even though this may not be the case. Also the test could be bad news for the pupils because they experience a lot of stress when they have to do these tests.

Reaction

I think in the Netherlands we have the same problem with the Cito-test. These tests are being taken at the end of the primary school when the children are about 11 or 12 years of age. From the results of these tests the school and parents can see which level of schooling their pupils will manage to follow at secondary school. These test are however also used to grade the school’s performance. A lot of teachers and schools are against it being used to grade the school, but the government just does not listen to these critics. I think this is, as well as the situation in Britain, bad for the education level of the whole country where parents only look at the test results of the SATs instead of looking at the school itself and the way the school gets along with the students.