Being a junior in high school, I am highly aware of the fact that SATs are coming up fast. Sophomores have to worry about taking the Keystones this year, and seniors- well they can be glad that the majority of those tests are behind them for their high school years. Even the students in elementary and middle schools have “high stake” standardized tests to worry about. PSSAs, Keystones, Benchmarks… it can all get pretty overwhelming.

Due to incessant testing, this generation has been called the most tested generation ever. These days, school is much more so about test after test after test. No wonder school has lost its appeal for some students. School has become less about real learning and more about teaching to the test. And as students advance to each new grade, this becomes more apparent.

Schools do everything they can to raise test scores, even if it means taking the joy out of learning. Many students say that they enjoy learning new things, but they dislike the way the information is drilled into their heads in school. Learning today has come down to teachers lecturing in class, then giving piles of homework at night in order to make sure the students know the material for the test. Yet, after all of that hard work, as soon as the test is over, the information that the students have learned is left on the scantron sheet.

Standardized tests are not the only way to judge the intelligence and progress of a student. There are plenty of students who are intelligent, but they are either not good test takers or are not intelligent in a way that can be tested. And then if they get bad grades, they begin to degrade themselves. Because these tests can determine if they graduate from high school on time or what college they get into, it isn’t difficult to see why students worry so much about them. Due to the increased amount of emphasis on tests, the pressure put on students to do well has been gradually getting worse as the years go on.  Students are becoming more and more stressed out over standardized tests, which is very damaging to a student’s well-being. According to a New York Times article, in 2010 the percentage of students whose emotional health was average or below average was 48%, as opposed to 36% in 1985. Researchers now strongly believe that there is correlation between testing and the health of students. On top of that, with testing comes rankings, and that’s a whole other issue that causes some students to overwork themselves so they can be at the top of their class.

But the use of class rank and standardized tests doesn’t always equal success. Take Finland for example. Students’ education does not include any standardized tests, except one final exam at the end of the school year. The students aren’t ranked, yet Finland has a higher percentage of students graduating than the U.S, and their education system ranks number one in the world, while we sit at seventeenth. Also, Finland is always described as a much happier country overall compared to the rest of the world, and that includes their students. Obviously Finland has done something right, and it isn’t over testing the students.

Standardized tests remove any opportunity for creativity. Teachers now need to follow the policy of teaching the test and, in turn, that removes a lot of the creative freedom from classes. The kids of the testing generation are being forced into a little box where the only thing being stressed is doing well on tests, which causes the students that can’t easily and naturally memorize every bit of information they learn, to panic about doing well.

“This idea of a standardized test is ridiculous because there is no such thing as ‘standard’ when it comes to how different students learn,” junior Shannon Drop said of the issue.

Standardized testing instills a natural feeling of anxiety in students and teaches them that memorizing information just for a test should be their highest priority, instead of actually learning things and becoming a well-rounded individual. The emphasis on testing does nothing to prepare students for what they are to face after they graduate, and that is something that should ordinarily be stressed but has been replaced by multiple choice tests that only evaluate a small fraction of a student’s knowledge and potential.

But if the United States really cares about its youth and how high it’s ranked in education, maybe we should listen to the students on this issue.