A pencil poises over a Scantron sheet seeking the correct bubble. Students are puzzling over their identical test forms and teachers hope that the results are favorable.

Whether it’s for placement in a higher level class or to determine how much you’ve learned, standardized tests wrongly dictate how you are seen in the eyes of the administration at school and the state you live in. Schools and states with the highest standardized test scores are lauded and respected. There are even special classes on test taking strategies so that students can obtain better scores. Some schools seem completely focused on these tests, and their entire school year is seemingly dedicated to preparing for them.

Schools should spend less time teaching their students to test well and more time helping students understand what their learning. However, that doesn’t seem to happen much.

American education emphasizes performance on standardized tests. One of the key arguments for being a “tiger mom,” a tough-love mother much like the ones in Asian countries, is that their children often test extremely well on standardized examinations.

But what do these examinations actually test? Honestly, there is a better question. It is, what do they not test?

Standardized tests do not test creativity. Someone who becomes an engineer cannot think inside the box. However, thinking inside the box is exactly what standardized tests assess. These tests examine a person’s ability to arrive upon an answer predetermined by a board of people that have determined them as correct.

Innovative and creative thinkers change the world. Sometimes these innovators do not do well on standardized tests. Sir Isaac Newton was thought to be mentally disabled at a young age. He went on to invent calculus. Countless others that have been deemed ‘genius’ in modern society have failed at these attempts to test what is considered necessary knowledge.

Creativity should be made a larger part of schools and encouraged amongst the students. Though the standardized tests may not deem creativity most important, it is doubtlessly essential to an education.

These tests often do not prove the true intelligence of a person, but instead their ability to ‘play the game’ so to speak, learning ways to rule out answers automatically and strategically skip questions that will lower your score.

In that regard, standardized testing could be considered unnecessary, a mere formality that does not test anything other than someone’s ability to get professional help and memorize testing formats.

I’m not suggesting that standardized testing should be eliminated from schools. However, I am saying that there are other ways to measure a person’s intellect and simultaneously gauge how creative their thinking is.