STAAR exams are something everyone knows, and everyone dreads. These exams are the bane of most students’ existence, but why do we do them? What’s the actual purpose of these exams? Most people believe that the testing we have in the Spring is used to gauge our understanding of everything we learned that year.
End-of-course exams are outdated, and at this point are just a waste of time more than ever before.
When it comes to these exams, they don’t help people retain information, and they stress people for no reason. Students are forced to study like this is the biggest test of their life, when in reality it’s just to see how well teachers have taught the material, and how well you can cram study in a couple of days.
STAAR exams can also deny students their high school diplomas if students do poorly, which isn’t good at all. These tests shouldn’t decide people’s ability to graduate, even when they’ve had high grades the entire school year. This shows how flawed a system schools have.
The other point is that we already do some similar, smaller, standardized tests for every class in the winter and in the spring, these being the TEKS tests, or DPM’s. Why not just use these as the replacement for STAAR exams, as these tests are graded and go into the grade book? These would be a better way to get the information, even more information than STAAR or EOC exams, as you can see which teachers are doing better in every single class on campus, rather than 5 different subjects.
People will say however that EOC testing is good as it holds students to the standards teachers want. On the contrary, teachers say this is for schools, and to see how good schools are. Most teachers give reviews like a week in advance so this doesn’t really seem to show any of the teachers “standards” that they want students to live up to.
So, to wrap things up, STAAR testing, or EOC testing, is useless in practice and most people treat it like some other test. Students try because they’re forced to and it stresses students out way more than it should. The way to limit this is to use information from TEKS testing, or DPM testing and finals to see how students are doing, and use those scores to show off the teachers and the school. This is something that could benefit everyone, as people aren’t as stressed about TEKS or DPM tests, and finals is the perfect time to show how everyone has learned information, and applied it to their studies.
