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Testing important

By Benjamin Bush
Arizona Daily Wildcat,
September 23, 1999

To the editor,

I am writing to respond to Sheila Bapat's editorial in Tuesday's Wildcat.

I would like to share what very little I can, given the limited space, about the importance of the standards-based movement in education today.

My home state of Virginia has been developing its Standards of Learning (SOL) exams over the past several years. The results of last year's exams across the state, even in some schools in very well educated Northern Virginia, were rather embarrassing, as the majority of students failed the rather simple SOL exams. The point is that the SOL exams, unlike SAT exams, were designed to test students' knowledge of the basic concepts they should know in order to be properly educated members of society. That similar standardized tests across the country are getting the same results is highly alarming. This is not a statistical fluke but an indicator of a long-standing problem in American education.

However, the concern over the results is precisely why the tests are important and

beneficial to education in this country. The standards-based system has pressured local school districts to place a renewed emphasis on helping students that have difficulty learning the course material, rather than simply ignoring the problem. Schools with long ignored problems are starting to receive renewed attention because of their students' poor performance on the tests.

The overall goal, which I highly applaud, is for students to meet the standards that were set at the start of this process. Expecting students to know at least a modicum of these basic concepts is of supreme importance if we are to have the well educated populace that our society will require in order to thrive.

Benjamin Bush

Political science sophomore


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