As a child, some of the scary memories include a visit to the dentist; an evil man with a scary exercise whose ultimate goal is to hurt you or on the first day of elementary school you finally leave everything behind the cozy classrooms and naps of kindergarten and enter the big leagues. All of these are considered child's play compared to standardized tests. From the beginning of elementary school, students in the United States are taught to take tests. In many cases, students are held back or placed in remedial classes because of lower grades. But many don't realize that some students aren't good at test-taking, and because of lower grades, some teachers believe these students are underachieving. This leads to lower self-esteem and encourages students to drop out in later years. Furthermore, students are forced to memorize information simply as facts without stimulating their creativity or improving their knowledge. Prior to the educational reform movements of the 1970s and 1980s, standardized tests were used primarily as measures of student achievement that could be reported to parents and as a measure of student achievement. means of detecting state and district trends (Luna 2) . Teachers paid little attention to these tests, which in turn had little impact on the curriculum. However, in the ongoing search for better schools and higher-achieving students, testing has become a central focus of policy and practice. Standardized tests are tests that attempt to present unbiased material under the same predetermined conditions and with consistent scoring and interpretation so that students have an equal opportunity to give correct answers and receive an accurate evaluation. The idea is that these similarities allow for the greatest degree of certainty in comparing results... middle of paper... ct on solid knowledge. Therefore, it is unfair to determine that a student may perform poorly in college simply because of a standardized test taken in high school. Overall it is evident that standardized testing has negatively affected education in the United States. The primary flaw is that politicians have made standardized testing the center of our education system, which has led to major changes in the curriculum where educators have been forced to teach to the test rather than instructional materials that promote creativity and improve knowledge. Howard Gardner, famous for his work on multiple intelligences, said he was not concerned that American children were ranked last among major industrial nations in the Third International Study of Mathematics and Science. He reported that the tests measure exposure to facts and skills and not whether or not children can think (Ritter 5).