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I feel kind of ambivalent about standardized tests. I think they could be worthwhile, but there are a lot of problems with how they are being used right now that ends up doing more harm than good.
I agree with many people that they serve well the students who are good test-takers or who are good at memorizing large amounts of data (myself included in that category) but that many otherwise-intelligent people do poorly on standardized tests. There's a lot that can't be tested on a standardized test purely for the fact that they are widely standardized. As well, outside of school people are rarely required to give information in a testing format, so the ability to test well is not actually useful outside the classroom.
That being said, I do think that standardized tests are a good measurement tool for getting a broad-spectrum idea of education levels - think surveys. I think ranking the individual students is pointless, for the above reasons, but the tests could be used as a comparison tool between one school and another, one region and another, one country and another. This only works, imho, if you take the whole body of scores as a range, zB: "This school's top-to-bottom scores ranged 20 points lower on math than all the other schools in the district."
Of course, when you use these tests to determine things like funding levels and teacher pay, it only results in having the instructors 'teach to the test', which is no good for anyone involved. So, yeah. *shrugs* 'Ambivalent' is a good word.
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