Mother Tongue

Achievement Tests

A society’s determined way to measure an individual’s skill and knowledge. According to the National Centre for Fair and Open Testing, achievement tests cannot be a completely fair, reliable, objective and unbiased test for a student. They were create based on a generalisation that society made from testing other people, but this test cannot accurately apply to everyone that takes it. These test prohibit students form expressing their creativity, diversity. These tests create stress of students because they need to get a good score in order to get a good salary. Additionally they reduce the richness of human learning to a number or set of numbers. Achievement tests were not developed by geniuses, they were created by mediocre minds that want to in-prison our minds into thinking just like theirs.

In achievement tests one of the things that cannot be shown are the creativity of a student. There will be yes or no questions, or questions that the student has to analyse a text or something alike. At the end of the day, you are grading a student’s intelligence and skill to show them through an insignificant piece of paper with writings on it. Based on that test score, the student’s life might be amazing, might be awful or might be okay. That test result has the power to decide if a person is worthy of working for a certain company or not. A person should not be marked on their levels of how to display skill and knowledge, and Amy Tan the writer of Mother Tongue fully supports this argument. An individual’s worth relies on more areas than just knowledge and skill, their creativity is a immense part of it, but that cannot be tested. Achievement tests were made for  ordinary people who will not stand out and conform to the rest of society, and that is why they will blend in amongst us. While individuals that could be more intelligent and skilful will probably not get the higher test score simply because they do not know how to display that through a piece of paper and a pen. Creativity is the use of imagination in order to create something original and that should be highly recognised in our world. Societies need to learn and understand that not everyone will have the same ways of performing or the same perspective on certain issues, and that is why are not fair.

Additionally another aspect that is really important to humans is diversity. If we were all equal first of all the world would be boring and second of all which is more important, is that nothing new would be invented, because there would be no one different. We would all have the same minds and think in the same way. And that is what achievement tests are trying to do to us. Society wants to get our minds into a prison were we all think alike and no one is different or out of line. Diversity is the key to our world because every individual is unique. Everyone learns in their own way and they also have their own way of showcasing their intelligence and skill. Achievement tests are completely biased and cannot be applied to the members of our community because everyone is different. This certain tests should not have the power of defining who is better than who, or who is right and who is wrong. According to Amy Tan, we all come from different backgrounds and we all learn in a different way therefore we should be tested based on the way we learned instead of generalising a test that the majority of the population and apply it to every single individual.

“Cause the purpose of "Why I hate school, but love education" was not to initiate a worldwide debate, But to let them know that whether 72 or 88, 44 or 68, We will not let exam results decide our fate”. - Suli Breaks