I am biased. I hate tests and prefer GPA, based on classroom grades. Where does my bias come from?
From 30 years as a classroom teacher, who focused on how children learn and remember what they are taught. Tests cannot measure what a teacher teaches and what a student remembers from what the teacher taught.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 
Susan Lee Schwartz
November 11, 2023 at 17:17
A test does not assess a skill !
Writing is a skill in which can best be assessed by a portfolio of a students work from the entire year.
Assessment and evaluation of progress , and the students meeting of the objectives, has always been the process of the teacher. Until the war on public school began, and the ploy to prove the incompetence of the teachers was to test the students.
The testing mania is not to evaluate the LEARNING OBJECTIVES of a student. It is to point a finger of blame at the teacher.
Lloyd Lofthouse
November 11, 2023 at 17:52
The human memory, our species memory, is not the same as Google where you ask a question and Google finds answers, a lot of them ,and many may be wrong. Still, even among our species, everyone’s memory doesn’t operate exactly the same way. We also do not all learn the same way.
Standardized tests ares more putting a quarter in a machine and expecting to get a specific candy bar back. Humans are not machines. In many instances, a teacher might teach what’s on the test, but the student isn’t paying attention, doesn’t do the work, doesn’t ask questions when confused or after school, something happens that distracts the student so as they fall asleep their thoughts are stuck on that after school event, whatever it is, and not on what the teacher taught.
Then there the one teacher and the fact taht they have 25 or more students. During my 30 years as a public classroom teacher, my average class load was 34 students in each class for 5 or 6 classes everyday school was in session.
One teacher teaching 170 – 204 students a day in one hour blocks of time for each class.
Those cursed standardized tests also do not take into account what living in poverty does to children. There’s been a lot of research on how poverty affects learning, but standardized tests ignore poverty, expecting all children to perform the same and punishing children and teachers when they do not get enough of those bubble headed questions right.
Maybe students should all be allowed to ask Google what the answers are on standardized tests as they take them. That way, maybe those students would learn more while reading several of the answer and then deciding which one might be correct. That is if they’d remember that decision by the next day or weeks or months later.
The results of ALL standardized tests are based on what students remember from what they were taught. And what they were taught, if they paid attention to the teacher, if the student did the work — the student might forget before the next morning. What we remember from each day until the next morning is mostly out of our power. While sleeping, our subconscious mind makes most of the decisions of what to keep and what to delete as our conscious mind sleeps and our body is dormant for at least 8 hours out of every 24 hours, since not getting enough sleep can make us sick and kill us and get in the way of remembering what teachers teach too.
Hell, I can get up from the home office desk where I’m writing this reply to your comment and walk to another room (like a 30 second walk) to do something and forget why I walked there by the time I arrived. That happens all the time.
What about witnesses to a crime? Studies have also shown that if we have 100 witnesses to the same crime, each witnesses may remember what they saw and heard differently than many of the other witnesses.