Throughout our education, students like me are constantly being tested to assess our knowledge of the material we have learned. However, do we really know what our test scores indicate? Lately, there has been a constant public debate over whether or not test scores are a good indication of a student's skills. Test scores do not accurately reflect a student's knowledge for several reasons. To fully understand the concept, we must first define what a test is. According to the article “The Importance of Testing is Psychology and Education,” published by a2zPsychology in 2002, “A test is defined as a measure of a person's knowledge, intelligence, or other characteristics of systematic manner. » Teachers are required to give exams to their students for many reasons, including: identifying what students have learned, discovering their learning abilities, determining their strengths and weaknesses, and deciding where to place a student. As noted in Charles Daves' article "Value of Standardized Tests in Indicating How Well Students are Learning" published by Jossey-Bass in 1984, "Critics have claimed that such tests measure only a narrow spectrum of abilities, that tests, by their very nature, discourage creative and imaginative thinking, that test results have far too great an effect on young people's chances of success, that multiple-choice tests wrongly emphasize "the right answer" and on simplicity instead of considered judgments, that tests favor the advantaged over the disadvantaged while pretending to be neutral and that the tests are inherently biased against those unfamiliar with the language and concepts of the majority culture . No test score can accurately determine a future...... middle of copy...... For standards to work effectively, it is established that students must take the same test under standardized circumstances. Standardization is a set of uniform procedures for treating each student on a test, ensuring that everyone tests under the same conditions. There are several cases where a student cannot be tested under the same conditions as their peers. For example, one student may have more time than others. For this reason, it is not fair. Other issues include: receiving clearer or more detailed instructions, being allowed to ask questions, and being motivated by a tester to perform better. Because of these conditions, it is difficult to analyze what a given test result indicates or how it relates to a comparison group. To resolve this dilemma, explicit instructions should be included to inform the administrator on how to take an exam to avoid unfairness..