Albert Einstein once said, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." This quote is a representation of standardized testing, many students struggle with these tests because they are long, timed, and do not necessarily test over what they have been prepared for. This paper is an analysis of standardized tests; it reveals many challenges towards students, teachers, and schools. These challenges include stress on students to score high on the test to get into a good college, stress on teachers to teach students what is on the test, and stress on the school to keep state and federal funding based on the students scores. .
Each year the ACT, American College Testing, has 1,666,017 students take the test and 1,664,479 students took the SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test, since the ACTs inception in 2011. The original record of standardized testing comes from China, to get a government job the candidates had to be tested over Confucian philosophy and poetry. Then as the Industrial Revolution took school-age kids out of the farms and factories and put them behind desks because tractors and machines took their places, standardized tests arose as an easy way to assess large numbers of students swiftly. In 1905, French psychologist Alfred Binet began making a standardized test of intelligence quiz, work that would ultimately be integrated into a form of the current IQ test, named the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test. By World War 1, standardized testing was typical preparation: aptitude quizzes called Army Mental Tests were given to give U.S. army men tasks during the war effort. Grading was at first done manually, a laborious task that went against standardized testing's goal of fast bulk testing. Until 1936 when scientist developed the first automatic test scanner, a basic computer called the IBM 805. It used electrical current to detect marks made by special pencils on tests, giving rise to the now universal bubbling-in of answers.