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[Magnhild Mongolo]

Do your homework assignments carefully, and turn them in on time. Review your notes daily. Write out your own study guides. Take advantage of any practice tests your teacher gives you, or even create your own.

In fact, cramming for a test is highly counterproductive. Not only are you less likely to retain the information you need, cramming also increases stress, negatively impacts sleep, and decreases your overall preparedness.

Having everything ready the night before will help you feel more confident and will minimize stress on the morning of the test. And it will give you a few extra minutes to sleep and eat a healthy breakfast.

Positive rituals can help combat negative thinking, test anxiety, and lack of focus that can easily undermine your success on test day. Plan some extra time to go for a short walk or listen to your favorite music. Engage in simple breathing exercises. Visualize yourself succeeding on the test.

Different types of tests require different test taking strategies. You may not want to approach a math test the same way you would an essay test, for example. And some computerized tests such as SATs require you to work through the test in a specific way.

The teacher or proctor may offer details about the structure of the test, time limitations, grading techniques, or other items that could impact your approach. They may also point out steps that you are likely to miss or other tips to help improve your chances of success.

For certain types of tests, remembering facts, data, or formulas is key. For these tests, it can be helpful to take a few minutes to write down all the information you need on a scrap paper before you get started.

Nearly every student gets nervous before a test at some point, especially if the exam is an important one. If you are lucky, your pre-test nervousness is mild and can be mitigated by these test taking tips.

Take a minute or two before or even during a test to focus on your breathing, relax tense muscles, do a quick positive visualization, or stretch your limbs. The calming effect can be beneficial and worth a few minutes of test time.

However, these test taking strategies can help you feel more confident and perform better on test day. Tests may be an inevitable part of student life, but with preparation and confidence, you can succeed on them all!

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We're in the middle of finals season, and students are beginning to prepare for their exams by making lists, writing flashcards, and memorizing facts. High school education has evolved from learning to memorization, promoting answering rather than comprehending.

A majority of students are focused more on obtaining good grades rather than understanding the concepts that are being taught. When school systems prioritize the importance of grades over education, students are likely to resort to cheating.

Since I have been attending school, achieving and maintaining good grades has always been my top priority. In elementary and middle school, I had no trouble reaching the goals that I had set out for myself. When I entered high school, material became harder. I spend more time memorizing facts and equations rather than studying or learning the concepts. When given a lab or a critical question, I have difficulty coming up with an answer because I had never fully grasped the idea. Learning through experience, a student is less likely to be engaged in topic if they know they can memorize facts and never critically think.

In recent years, standardized testing has becoming increasingly more popular, and in public education, funding is often given to schools with the highest standardized test scores. According to the Washington Post, students between kindergarten and 12th grade take roughly 112 standardized tests.

Since the basis of questions on standardized tests are multiple choice and promote memorization, students can memorize a series of facts and be able to spit them out for the test; afterwards, the information that was memorized will quickly be forgotten. These tests typically lack any form of critical thinking. Teachers are more likely to teach information that will appear on these tests, and this reduces the quality of the education that a student receives.

I have seen many students turn to cheating in order to avoid failing or getting anything lower than an A. They feel pressured to achieve good grades even if it means using unethical methods. Teachers commend their high tests scores, but they do not realize that the grades were achieved unfairly.

According to the Open Education Database, a study done at Fordham University found that the average GPA for cheaters was higher than that of non-cheaters. Good grades are being valued higher than an honor system.

How do we solve this issue? The evaluations that teachers give us could include more critical thinking questions. This would mean that less multiple choice questions should be given and more analysis of data, readings, and case studies.

Learning and fully understanding a concept will help us come up with more creative ways to solve problems, and we will be able to apply the concepts in other situations, and combine new knowledge with what we already know.

Memorization does not help you completely grasp the idea or give you the ability to apply the concept to another problem. If a person memorizes the definition of a word, but they cannot use it in a sentence, they do not truly know the meaning of the word. Memorization will always play a key factor in the education system, but the idea that it is more important to understand the concept should be emphasized.

Every classroom should have a well-educated, professional teacher, and school systems should recruit, prepare, and retain teachers who are qualified to do the job. Yet in practice, American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers.

A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that, although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation. Some states are now considering plans that would give as much as 50% of the weight in teacher evaluation and compensation decisions to scores on existing tests of basic skills in math and reading. Based on the evidence, we consider this unwise. Any sound evaluation will necessarily involve a balancing of many factors that provide a more accurate view of what teachers in fact do in the classroom and how that contributes to student learning.

Nonetheless, there is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed.

For these and other reasons, the research community has cautioned against the heavy reliance on test scores, even when sophisticated VAM methods are used, for high stakes decisions such as pay, evaluation, or tenure. For instance, the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences stated,

VAM results should not serve as the sole or principal basis for making consequential decisions about teachers. There are many pitfalls to making causal attributions of teacher effectiveness on the basis of the kinds of data available from typical school districts. We still lack sufficient understanding of how seriously the different technical problems threaten the validity of such interpretations.

Student test score gains are also strongly influenced by school attendance and a variety of out-of-school learning experiences at home, with peers, at museums and libraries, in summer programs, on-line, and in the community. Well-educated and supportive parents can help their children with homework and secure a wide variety of other advantages for them. Other children have parents who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to support their learning academically. Student test score gains are also influenced by family resources, student health, family mobility, and the influence of neighborhood peers and of classmates who may be relatively more advantaged or disadvantaged.

Recognizing the technical and practical limitations of what test scores can accurately reflect, we conclude that changes in test scores should be used only as a modest part of a broader set of evidence about teacher practice.

Besides concerns about statistical methodology, other practical and policy considerations weigh against heavy reliance on student test scores to evaluate teachers. Research shows that an excessive focus on basic math and reading scores can lead to narrowing and over-simplifying the curriculum to only the subjects and formats that are tested, reducing the attention to science, history, the arts, civics, and foreign language, as well as to writing, research, and more complex problem-solving tasks.

Tying teacher evaluation and sanctions to test score results can discourage teachers from wanting to work in schools with the neediest students, while the large, unpredictable variation in the results and their perceived unfairness can undermine teacher morale. Surveys have found that teacher attrition and demoralization have been associated with test-based accountability efforts, particularly in high-need schools.

Evaluation by competent supervisors and peers, employing such approaches, should form the foundation of teacher evaluation systems, with a supplemental role played by multiple measures of student learning gains that, where appropriate, could include test scores. Some districts have found ways to identify, improve, and as necessary, dismiss teachers using strategies like peer assistance and evaluation that offer intensive mentoring and review panels. These and other approaches should be the focus of experimentation by states and districts.

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