"Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count and everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." - Albert Einstein Every year, thousands of American students are given the task of participating in standardized testing. Acting as a lens inside the classroom, the test evaluates what each student has learned over the course of a school year. If intelligence comes in many different forms can the quality of a child's education truly be determined by test scores alone? I think not. Although commonly considered a fairly objective measure of skill and ability, standardized testing has proven unsuccessful in improving classroom instruction as well as performance and should therefore be done away with in order to amend issues such as inaccurate measurements, the drilling of information, and score inflation. The main objective behind standardized testing is to assess a student's skills and illustrate their progression over time, but in reality the exam proves to be an inaccurate reflection of the students' academic value. Roger Farr, the Professor of Education at Indiana State University, has publicly recognized this topic in saying that "there's no way to build a multiple choice question that allows students to show what they can do with what they know." Rewarding quick answers, the test does not measure the student's exact thought process nor does it evaluate creative thinking such as the construction of ideas. Many students possess weaker testing skills and the opportunity to guess on multiple choice exams often results in erroneous data for schools nationwide, thus damaging the assessment's credibility. In preparation of major tests teachers begin to go over information with their classes repeatedly which eventually starts to extract the fun from learning. China's education system is famous for their emphasis on hard work, but with such a "test-oriented system [their] schools stifle creativity, and deprive children of the joys of childhood" (264). This demonstrates that by placing such focus upon studies, other outlets like art and music are left "stifled with nowhere to blossom." Tired and stressed, students have been known to drop out prior to graduation after being fed up with all the rigorous preparation. Such repetition places an immense amount of pressure on students and actually can have the opposite effect and negatively affect per