Estimating the Cost of Standardized Student Testing in the United States.

is generally agreed that, as tests go, ordinary standardized student tests are inexpensive. It would take relatively enormous resources, for example, for an individual school to develop tests from scratch that contain the reliability and comparative properties of the standardized tests produced by commercial vendors and state education agencies. To people outside the field, then, the cost of standardized student testing would likely seem a rather straightforward topic. But, within the field, it's an anxiety-producing subject that spawns tense arguments. The arguments tend to turn on the worth or intrinsic educational value of the tests themselves, the amount of time taken up by test-taking and test-preparation, and the assignment or lack thereof of particular cost components as attributable to standardized testing. If one chooses to believe, for example, that standardized testtaking and test-preparation time have no intrinsic instructional value and, further, that standardized tests are separate from and contribute nothing to the instructional plan of a school, then one might well consider standardized tests to be very costly, because they take up time that might otherwise be devoted to instruction. To such critics, the problematic costs associated with standardized tests are not represented by the purchase price paid to the commercial vendors but, rather, by the lost opportunity for learning that could have taken place in the time devoted to standardized tests.