October 19, 2016

Dear Future President

I know that you’re busy doing things to help improve the United States and the World, but if you have the time to read this then i hope you can make a change. I think that we spend too much time doing standardized testing. A typical student take about 112 standardized test through kindergarten to 12th grade. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot but once you add up the time testing and the time that teachers have you do pretest to make sure you know what the test is like you’ve wasted a lot of time that you could be using to learn something new. Another problem I have with standardized testing is that most of the questions on the tests are things you haven’t even been taught yet. My last problem is that if a student is like me then they can’t focus for long enough to take a multiple hour test, so they end up rushing through it and guessing on most of the questions.

You can easily fix this by having the teacher plug in topics that we learned throughout the year and having the computer generate questions in those topics. To make it so you waste less time preparing and doing standardized tests you can get rid of the tests that are supposed to place you in classes for the next year, and you can just use the student's grades and work from the previous year to place them in classes. You could help the students who can’t concentrate for long enough to take long tests by having them broken up into multiple shorter tests.

I hope you take my concerns about standardized testing into consideration. But if you don’t I understand that you’re doing better things that will change the world rather than just changing the school system. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Brenden C.

Billings, Montana

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/study-says-standardized-testing-is-overwhelming-nations-public-schools/2015/10/24/8a22092c-79ae-11e5-a958-d889faf561dc_story.html