Assessing Students

In the past the initial purpose of intelligence testing was to separate the high ability students from the lower ability. This was a was that educators could determine who receives high quality education Educators believed that students who scored high on the intelligence test had higher levels of thinking than those who scored at the lower levels. I believe that isolating high achieving students and low achieving students would develop unintended social roles in low achieving students. Is it really fair that students identified as having low ability are not given the opportunities of high quality education? Because of differences in learning materials students identified as low achievers will continue to perform poorly in school and students identified as high achievers will continue to succeed. The people who do poorly on IQ test may not always be the ones who need the help. The students that are improperly identified by the IQ test for the need of remedial help will likely fall behind peers as a result of the special education services. As a result students can never catch up to their peers and their lives would never be what it could have been. I found it impossible for a 30 minute test to determine the direction of a student’s life. Students that are improperly labeled as poor achievers by intelligence test become unmotivated to learn and act out in delinquent ways. I think that there are important long term consequences to such testing and that more research should be done before any decisions of value can be implemented.