We're a team full of educators, so this is a topic we care about a lot. We hope you noticed the book recommendation we included at the end of this vid. You can download an audio version of the book for free at www.audible.com/teded. Every free trial created encourages Audible to continue supporting TED-Ed's nonprofit mission. For more book recommendations from the TED-Ed team, please visit ed.ted.com/books. Thanks!

"Children cheat on tests because the system values grades higher than the children value learning." - Neil Degrasse Tyson

Mark twain once said "Children do bad on standardized, because they don't have standardized minds"

*Job Interview* employer: I see you did well in school, what are your REAL-LIFE skills? Me: TESTS. I can take tests.

I don't know, I feel like we need to revise the way schooling is in general. I love learning, but I hated the way tests overshadowed everything and feeling like I failed if I got less than an A. Not to mention, if you fall behind it's really hard to catch up. I don't think standardized testing should be done away with, but I think they shouldn't be the deciding factor of whether you fail or not. Kids don't learn, they memorize and cram and cheat. Learning shouldn't be stressful.

One of the main problems with tests, is the narrow time limit, especially ones which require a lot of writing such an a History exam. It turns into a race to jot down as much as you can on a pre-practised script, rather than show much deep knowledge on a subject. I remember in my English exam in school (literature and films) we had to write 4 essays in 3 hours. So what we were taught to do was have a pre-memorised essay, that we could twist around a little bit to suit the essay question that was asked. It was entirely based on blasting out a bunch of pages in as short a time as possible, which surely isn't what tests should be about.

ted-ed is simply one of the best channels on KZfaq. The animations are always so nice, and the topics are well presented. Channels like this are the reason KZfaq is such a nice platform.

* remembers a certain math task i couldnt solve because i had no clue about football * yeah it can be bs

School made me forget how much I loved to learn for a very long time. I aim to change that for myself but it needs to be addressed in schools today.

a few years ago, I got a thing called a cataract in my eyes which made me blind. at the same time, our school, as well as all the other schools, were doing standardized testing. my parents explained to the teachers that I was blind and was going to have surgery and asked if I could take the test at a later date. they said no and made me take the test anyway. the test was a reading test, but they didn't allow the teacher to read it to me. I ended up failing the test and I had to take an extra class to "help me be better in reading". the next year I scored above average and now have a passion for writing. this just shows you how little standardized testing shows the ability of a child.

I'd like standardized tests more if they gave us enough time to finish them.

Kids aren't widgets running down a quality control assembly line. But they also can't be crafted individually to their strengths. There is, as always, a midpoint that we have to agree upon and make work.

Read 3 short stories and answer 60 questions in under 30 minutes. seems legit

Managed to make it through university. As someone who really struggles under exam conditions, the demoralization and the 'shame' of not doing well have really eaten at my self-esteem. But I'm on my way up regardless of what exam scores tell me.

I think we should stop asking the question can we do away with standardized testing or testing in general but rather should we get rid of the for profit standardized testing that can make it's testing format with little accountability and is allowed to sell expensive courses designed specifically to teach to that test

I'm 2 years late on this topic but I would want to express my thoughts. I want the school exams to be a measure of what you have learned in a period of time and not a measure of how smart you are and what is your rank against your classmates. Makes me remember how I was back in highschool. I had always been good at test and my goal was to ace every single one of them because failing was humiliating and having good grades get you awards and praise from your parents. So I'd rather be alone and study all the time. I'd rather stay at home than socialize & go to parties because I didn't want to be like my peers who often fail on their exams. When I got to college, i started to realize my highschool life taught me the wrong thing. In highschool, exam scores held the highest percentage of your overall grade. As long as you ace them, you'll be part of the honor roll. In college, you should be more active in participating to earn high grades. Recitation, reporting, joining clubs, & extra curricular activities. I wasn't that person and they made me anxious. I struggled on my grades. These stress of fitting in, wanting to be an ace student, anxiety from too much interaction weighed heavy on me and affected my performance. I wish my grade school and high school didn't focused on these examinations and scores so that I would actually absorb what was taught and not just memorize them for grades. Exams didn't really taught me how it is in the real world. You don't really need to remember all info in the subject to get a good job. They made be hate school at a time. One annoying fact is that your peers who didn't actually took school that seriously have a better life after school than you who dedicated so much to be a top student. I don't completely blame education, teachers, institution however the education department and school officials should modify our learning system. Anyway, I also hope someday exams will not be a factor for universities to accept students. I think it's discrimination to decline student's enrollment just because they are unable to pass a test.

TL;DW: No, but we should design them in a more flexible and efficient way.

I love I’m watching this the day before an SAT. My GPA has always been fairly good, grades good, my attendance good, I’m very involved in after school activities like a sport and clubs, community service, and I even have a job. Yet my SAT score has always stressed me out cause it’s never been that good. There’s two reason why is one; I hate being timed when I’m given lengthy questions, and I would study more I just don’t have the time. Plus because of how it’s set up I get angry at studying for the SAT when I do have the time cause I just don’t want to deal with it. I hate how, as a senior, I have to stress so much over a set of numbers for getting into a school that will help my career.

At least here in America, yes we should. The fact that the SAT's can have the potential to make or break you in deciding your undergraduate career is ridiculous. Merit should be measured on areas that measures the students' understanding of the subject such as AP scores, their discipline in studies as reflected by GPA, and their outside interests by their varying extracurricular activities.

My opinion: No student should be shown a number to make up their intelligence. The labeling of students and their thought processes is ridiculously harmful to their self worth and self esteem. One arbitrary number doesn’t make up their intelligence and no student deserves to have a high or low number shoved in their face as it is highly dehumanizing and suggests that students are not individual people but rather numbers.

I feel like most tests should be open book. Since it’s not like in real life your boss is going to hand you some tax filings and tell you to file them out from memory without any help

Standardize tests only work to a certain extent.

We do need them to see just how badly the public school system is failing :P

One change that should be made when it comes standardized testing in schools is advanced exemptions. This will make it to where those in Honors, Pre-AP, or AP courses are exempt from a standardized test because they’ve demonstrated an even higher knowledge on a subject than the minimum allowing for a class to stay on course instead of having to set time aside for an unnecessary test.

It's so refreshing to see a video that actually explains this topic instead of politicizing it

As long as standardized testing is for-profit, it's hard to see an improvement in the education system as a whole.

When I started university as a STEM major, I got to skip the first 2 semesters of math due to my AP Calculus test scores. I took Linear Algebra as the first math course at university ... and failed miserably, even though I was able to do all the assignments, most of which were open-book. That's because Linear Algebra was the first math course in which I couldn't get by just by memorizing formulas and algorithms; I also had to know when and how to apply those algorithms. In my professor's words, it was the first "real math" course.

"Standardized tests may help to learn a little about a lot of people in a short time, but cannot tell us a lot about a single person." This is so accurate...

When I was in college, I was tutoring a younger student in Russian who was in danger of flunking out of her class. She seemed to be doing well whenever we reviewed stuff, but I could tell that whenever we met up she was nervous around me, especially when I had to look over her tests and ask her about the mistakes she made. She seemed to have really crippling anxiety about looking over her mistakes, which she probably perceived as signs of her failings. Her professor also told me that in class, she would freeze up when called on to fill out the end of a question. One day, I decided to bring in someone who lived on my hall who was a fluent Russian speaker and have them talk to each other. I recorded their conversation without telling her. It was like night and day. She moved through the conversation easily, even when she had to stop and explain that she didn't know that word. When I went back and listened to the recording, I found that she would consistently repeat the last few words spoken to her and use them to rephrase something into a new topic. She was learning in the most natural way possible, the same way a baby learns a language, and she could carry a simple conversation on a variety of topics for twenty minutes. I tried to tell the professor that she wouldn't be able to advance if she were given the same tests as everyone else because she had test anxiety and, more specifically, she was most linguistically competent at completing novel phrases inspired by minimal input, rather than being asked to complete phrases with definite answers. If she had progressed in that class, or maybe skipped to intermediate with some additional vocab studies, she might've become fluent in record time. The professor said everyone had to take the same tests so that the whole class be on the 'same level of competency.' She ended up failing out.

I was fortunate enough to be able to go to private school for one year so I could take algebra... the reason I had to go was because due to standardized testing I was not "smart enough" to get into algebra in 8th grade per public school standards. I feel my career has proved otherwise.

Getting completely rid of standardized tests is not the answer. Asking the questions in a clear way would go a long way to help. We could also offer alternative methods to help those who struggle with that format. If we completely take away standardized tests, then you start to punish those who excel at them and just put us in a reversed issue.

Standardised tests do have their value but a more complete and inclusive test is required. One that measures as many skills as possible and creates an average grade based on these skills.

I feel standardized testing is a symptom of a greater issue, namely with education in general. Education expects all people to have the same skill in everything, and pushes them to learn things they have 0 reason to care about and punishes them if they have any issues for one reason or another.

In high school I was super invisible and bullied my teachers hardly even noticed me but today I own my own company and. plan on being a humanitarian

personally i think standardized testing is usable method to determine a persons baseline knowledge and make necessary alterations to their education based on careful review of the answers given. post test reviews and pretest study guides are the most valuable resources when trying to determine what information is important. it is also important to inform the students of the question types they should expect on upcoming exams as this information helps guide study.

The problem is that in our school system, kids are not encouraged to learn for the sake of exploration and innovation. They are only encouraged to stuff as much knowledge into their brains in a tiny span of time in order to regurgitate them during test taking. It's more of a game memorization instead of an understanding of the subject matter. This is why as soon as we get back from breaks and summer vacation, all of the learned content is immediately forgotten. That and the fact that standardized tests completely ignore the more psychological nuances from person to person and treats testers as machines. Those that are more neurotic and anxious have a hard time.

why are the heads sooo small?

As a teacher of 39 years I’ve always been of the opinion that standardised tests are ONLY useful IF - you have standardised students, with standardised abilities, from standardised backgrounds - OH, AND - having a standardised day!

Dear Ted Ed creators, I absolutely love ted Ed. Thank you for all the amazing work and being yourselves. I would love to listen to your suggested book “the end of average by Todd rose” but the audible version is not available in UK unfortunately. Is there another way to get an audible copy of it?

Standardized testing for children, meaning teens and younger, seems a little strange to me. Aren’t their brains still developing? Isn’t it difficult to accurately measure intelligence if a person’s brain isn’t finished growing yet?

If you don't "remember" this or fill out these A B C D bubbles in the right order You're gonna be living on the streets Like how does that make any sense

In my school we are not just given grades just over a big test, but what we do a test we do every week and then they take the average, and we also do a big test in the middle of the year, giving us the overall results and the average can make the grade higher or lower. It's a new thing that we barely just started.

The topic is great and you realy made me thinking. It's cool that the visual representation is so enjoyable as well!

Intro quote... thank you. I relate so much.

Hi, my name is Kalvin Nue and I currently live in New Jersey with my parents. I am 17 years old and currently in 11th grade. I have problems talking when using long sentences or giving speeches, so I’ll just express myself in text form. I am actually tearing up while typing this. I just had my SAT on May 8, 2021, and the score that I got back was an 800. I had 18/52 on the Reading section, 16/44 on the Writing & Language section, 7/20 on the Math without Calculator section, and 10/38 on the Math with Calculator section. I was expecting a score like that, but at the same time I wasn’t and I’m not proud of it. Before taking my SAT, I have online tutoring classes and would sometimes do practice tests. I would normally get scores of 1000+, but this time was very different despite what comfort and advice my peers gave to me. On the day I took my SAT, I had my first panic attack. I was just so scared and stress-filled, and it’s this moment that I realized I have anxiety problems. Even though my brain told me to man up and that I can do the SAT, my body rejected it. Since I was surrounded by other people, I was so worried that I could be the only one in the room to have the lowest score. It doesn’t help that my parents and tutor really wanted me to score with flying colors. That pressure mixed with my anxiety made me fail the SAT. After they found out about my score, they were really disappointed and upset with me. Even though my dad told me that everything is going to be okay, I was really sad that Monday evening and cried in my sleep. That situation of mine reminded me of this one episode of the Casagrandes, the spin-off series of Loud House. In the eleventh episode of the first season, titled Stress Test, the plot follows the family helping a stressed, anxiety-filled Bobby pass his BAT (big academic test). Bobby manages to pass the test when he takes the test again but when he’s in a mock-up of the Mercado, the one place he feels comfortable taking the test. Now that I got my scores, I have suffered into a deep depression. These last days, my heart keeps pumping a bit faster than usual and I’m always feeling down. Now I’m really worried about my next SAT in 12th grade, I had so much potential. I am indeed jealous that some of my other peers have scores of 1000+. It’s times like this where I question if I am actually happy with my life. I know all the life lessons where “Hard work always pays off.”, etc, but I keep always thinking about whether life hates me. I don’t hate school, I really do love school. I don’t want to be a dropout, I don’t want to fail, I want to graduate high school, I want to go to college and graduate, I want to make my parents proud, but I wish I was much more successful. I’m ashamed to say that I keep daydreaming about me being more smarter and successful. Where I get straight As in every class and would graduate at a young age, but that’s just my fantasy. I don't know what's wrong with me, I really need help.

No, but seriously, why are their heads so small? It's distracting...

The animation in this video is stunning. Thank you Ted-Ed for continuously making consistent and high quality content!

2:18 How do you break a ruler using the thin part?

1:28 Sweden is on the list :') . Sweden is never on the list, always forgotten, we're the middle child of the world.

A test should measure how well someone has learned without changing the focus of the learning to be preparing for the test. This is a very difficult problem to solve. Currently doing my GCSEs, I can look back and see how much time we were spending learning how to answer exam questions instead of learning new content. Half or more of every lesson was spent on practising answering questions, and in many subjects we spent whole weeks on how to play the "exam game". Don't even start me on English, which for us, at least, was pretty much 90% exam technique and learning the requirements for each essay question. For certain topics, we simple memorised answers which we would copy down in the rest itself.

Thanks TED-Ed! I really enjoyed that animation and narration!

I just learned this yesterday in my education assessment class!!

Oh look at Chile, we have an standardized test for when we end school, called the PSU (previously known as PAA), which is the MAIN reason an University will pick you up or not. And it's based on how much snow YOU got, not a comparison or something like that. Some people suicide for getting a low score.

You can measure the circumference by using the ruler to measure the radius and they multiply it by 2 pi.

adding this to my "favorites" playlist

Why can't you put two bear together They're polar

can somebody explain to me why the 70 percentile correspond to 70 percent below? where I'm from it's the opposite way round

“Teacher bot can’t teach, but teacher bot can TEST!” -CGP Grey

The circumference of a circle always equals the product of pie (approximately 3.14) and the diameter. To measure the circumference of a fruit with a measuring ruled, first cut the fruit in half, then use the ruler to measure the diameter, then multiply the diameter by pie.

I’ve always hated tests, you know, the ones one a piece of paper with either multiple choice questions or long answer questions. This is because a test doesn’t measure how well you understand the subject, but how well you understand the test and what’s being asked in that specific test, in that specific instance. For example if everyone watches a movie and then takes a test on what they saw, the majority would probably be able to understand the basic plot and characters, but tests assume you’d know that, so instead you get asked a question like: what was the color of the walls in scene 1? To challenge your understanding of what you saw, even though you are usually unprepared to focus on those kinds of areas, because you were looking at the bigger pieces. The best test experience I ever had was a one in one conversation with my first aid teacher, in which I was tasked to re-teach him what he had taught me. That was the test, retelling the teacher how to handle circumstances and proper first aid procedures. Btw I took a film study course in university and that question was a legitimate example that I have experienced in a test.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." A similar problem to standardized testing occurs with grade inflation. Teachers are measured on how well their students do, and how well they improve as the year goes on. So teachers will consequently be more lenient in how they grade in order to inflate how well their students are. There is no incentive to flunk a student who is actually not doing well. Or to give that 4.0 student a B when they actually deserve it. Nobody likes failure, or the realization that they aren't perfect. They are hard pills to swallow, but they are necessary if the student wants to actually legitimately improve, or if we want to make a more well-rounded testing system, and have a more realistic understanding of how our students are doing.

im ten in year 6 i love listenig ted ed 😍😍😍

@2:05-.-The guy singing it literally sounds exactly like a vocal track used for various songs in the video game DanganRonpa: Another Episode (Ultra Despair Girls).

As someone who is in exam week right now I can definitely say that I would like the system to change. 3 hour exams, sometimes 2 in one day is exhausting and I cannot concentrate for that long, after the 1st hour my mind just wanders too much. Trying to study for every subject as well, some of my subjects have 3 topics within them as well is a lot of effort. I would much prefer that the exams for a topic were just after learning that topic. Then I would remember the information much better and wouldn't be so stressed out having to learn so much in so little time.

Standardized tests seem like the most reliable assessment tool available to us nowadays. Just think of this unlikely alternative: a college's admission officer decides which students will be admitted wholly by looking at their grades during 4 high school years. That'd be far more unfair, cos different teachers in different schools from different areas will give widely different scores to a particular performance (especially true for social science essays) Plus, I think a *single* standardized test result may not speak up everything about its owner, but *a number of* them can really say something. Accept it - bad luck or good luck cannot always happen to you, it's your efforts to improve yourself in the long term that really matter!

I hate standardized tests

Very well put video. I really hope people begin to understand this about tests. The idea of testing is not wrong, it is the way we do it.

This video is made for someone like me. A doctor with dyslexia without test accommodations. I was not diagnosed until after medical school and have struggled my entire life academically. Accommodations were refused by the NBME (National Board of Medical Examinee) because they concluded that someone with the most severe dyslexia could not have finished high school, let alone medical school without help. Because I had, they called me a liar. I also have a degree in studio arts. I am a chef and I am an aspiring surgeon with surgical experience is general surgery, orthopedic, and plastic surgery.

Finland has probably one of the finest education systems in the world. They’ve also stopped using standardized tests.

I love TED-Ed!!

Very good talk; a lot there that I didn't consider and shows that there's a lot to this debate.

It’s horrific here in the UK. For GCSEs and A-levels you spend two whole years revising for the exam and you get one big final exam for each subject within a month. The exams take 1-3 hours and it determines your whole grade/ your whole future. You Americans have it easier.

Imho school has a lot bigger problems that standardise tests. It is usually centred on passing the tests, and not on learning. Because tests are far from perfect, learning is inefficient. Instead school should focus on learning first, and on passing tests much less.

New debate: what are jobs and what jobs should be and for!

My personal opinion is that how well you score depends on how well you can figure out what the test wants from you. It's not about what you know or how well you understand it, it's about knowing what kind of questions you're gonna get and preparing for that.

We can measure the circumference of an orange by a ruler by drawing a line along the circumference using a mareker. Then usin a ruler mark a small line every 1 mm along the circumference. Then count the total number of small lines. Multiply the number of divisions with 1 mm . And we'll get the circumference in milimeters which can be converted in centimetres.

I feel that students should have a basic knowledge of certain things in each subject. If students are graduating high school without basic competency in grammar, history, science, etc. then what is the point of our education system? Standardized tests show us how well our schools are actually doing at teaching the base level. But they shouldn't be a measure of how smart any one student is, since they only measure how well a person knew the information on the test. That being said, college admission tests can be somewhat effective because they are again, measuring knowledge, something relevant to going to college. It's still not claiming to be an IQ test.

anxiety, literacy, cultural background ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT PART!!! being able to manage those things in what makes you successful in real life!! the information on the test is almost never used in real life but the process of taking the test is. The relatively meaningless information on a 5th grade history test is not important. but the life skill associated with preparing for an important moment, along with managing your stress, being able to adapt to different writing styles, and assimilating to the new culture of a work place are VERY IMPORTANT life long skills

Excellent video.

Ted -Ed is doing a wonderful job of creating awareness about some of the highly entrenched modern misconceptions.

We need standardized test to be a tool to measure learning difficulties among students and then help them to improve the way they learn. In that way, students can achieve more easily their goals. We want equality and equity in our society, but we use standardized test just to see what people is more valuable than others. This has gone too far.

Last time I was this early.... Jake Paul was still on Vine

Exams work differently in Germany. Tests that are solely multiple choice are illegal. Instead, we get some kind of text that we first have to summarize a certain aspect from, then analyze the issue presented in it and then we have to critically answer a question, such as "will this course of action solve whatever problem is presented in the text or does it have to be tackled differently?" For all of those tasks, we need to write long texts. (Most people write about 1000 words in every exam) That way, we actually have to think and applicate information to situations that are only similar to the ones we practiced it on other than just remembering facts.

Testing in general is just a pain, just had a professor give me a test with 44 questions in 50 minutes, translating sentences and words Latin to English and English to Latin. Even my final for the same class is the same number of questions but in 2hrs.

2:06 actually if we know the thermal coefficient we CAN measure temperature differences

This really doesn't really say anything at all about STANDARDIZED tests, just tests in general. If you're going to be testing, for comparative purposes, of course you want the tests to be standardized. That just means they're taking the same test. Comparing the results of different tests is useless. Whatever that same test you want everyone to take, though, needs to be designed right, in accordance with the concerns raised here, but those things have nothing to do with whether it's standardized or not.

Thank you for sharing this video. God bless you. 💗

This video is so calming! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻❤️❤️❤️

It's all well and good to point out the potential shortcomings of standardised tests but what are you thinking of replacing it with? Nepotism? Lucky dip?

Yupp , in my country ,students are only trained to answer these tests instead of teaching them the fundamental knowledge... especially in maths and science...RIP

Best video I ever watched , thanks Ted , haha.

one time i forgot what a thermometer was during a test.. i get very stressed during tests and it often messes with my scores. that might just be my anxiety and frequent panic attacks though

Well the real problem comes when the test / country which takes the test has a huge population. India has a huge population of students and in exams like JEE and NEET , any "fairer" means of testing will simply take too much time to be executed. Sad truth .

Whenever i take a test my mind is trying to chose between "the right answer" and "the answer they want to recive"

Help needed.The audio book cannot be downloaded.it requires amazon account.

You did a great job explaining that, Said some one who study Psychological tools and Psychometric

I alway confuse you thumbnails with those from the school of life

But here's another problem, what defines the smartness of the person?

So many comments about the relevance of questions to what the test is suppose to assess. I have my own story. Before nursing school, I was required to take the ATI TEAS exam. It's used to assess how well one will do in nursing school. It gave me a scenario that required me to evaluate methods of collecting and analyzing data on chimney swifts, a group of birds that would inhabit chimneys as an adapted method of overcoming industrialization in America. I'm sure I got some questions wrong, especially when it came to the collection of measurement data on that specific bird. I'm about to graduate from nursing school now and I still have yet to apply my knowledge of birds to patients suffering from hypertension or diabetes.

The singing at 2:05 reminds me of Monokuma