Testing. It creates a shiver down your spine. You start breaking a sweat. It creates stress and anxiety. You don’t know how the questions will be. Have I seen them before? Did I study enough? Will it hurt my grade? One kid is shaking their leg. One kid has their head in their hands. Testing could be minutes or hours long. Your brain is strained, you get to a point where you just want to stop so you stop caring. On top of stress and anxiety, there are unknown barriers that are stopping you from achieving your best potential. It is everywhere, in hidden sight. On billboards, in movies, in songs, in books, in poems, and magazines. In website ads, food products, and even in your house with all the technology we have today.

Bias is everywhere, but where it impacts the greatest group of people is in a testing room. It has the effect of putting a certain group of people above everyone else. Giving them the opportunities that maybe others have spent a lifetime working for, just for them to be stripped of the experience. When you are stripped of experience, knowing that it is being given to someone else all because of their race or social class, it has an impact on your mental health. The way you study, the way you motivate, the way you stress. It can all impact one mind, one action, one opportunity.

Bias contributes to more than just a score. It contributes to mental health, stereotypes, and judging people based on covers and not on their potential. If you don’t give everyone the same opportunities and chances, you will never know how much potential someone really has.

Stress

Bias can create more unnecessary stress for a student therefore producing bad scores. Stress and anxiety are already present in a testing room. When you add bias, you now have students stressing more about the fact that they have to prove themselves. Anxiety spreads from student to student. When one student feels unease and tension the other will too. This stressful environment creates a feeding ground for emotions to get in the way of potential. According to Hanif Akhtar and Retno Firdiyanti, “A lack of test-taking motivation becomes one of the main concerns…can manifest in low effort to complete the test, which can threaten test scores’ validity.” Motivation will start to decrease in students who know that, because of bias, they already have a low chance of a high score, so why would they put in the work when they know that they are already going to fail.

Producing more stress puts the student at a disadvantage because they are now being controlled by emotion not logic. Seeing the way bias is contributing in the classroom with mental health, it can also affect people in an office job.

Stereotypes

Bias contributes to stereotypes by giving certain groups of people the upper-hand. Asians score the highest out of all racial groups. Males score higher than females. When tests put in certain language can create language barriers for both non-speakers and speakers based on slang and usage. Contributing questions to a certain group(s) life experiences gives them the upper hand as well.

Putting groups of people against each other because of bias creates unnecessary tension between students and possibly teachers as well. No one should get the upper hand just because of what they look like or their gender. That is then contributing against things that history has worked hard to stop. We should avoid the possibility of recreating history.

Limitations

When bias starts taking opportunities away from certain groups of people, it becomes a larger issue than just a test score. When hard working people put in the effort and get rewarded with nothing, their opportunities are now being limited. Limiting someone on an experience by altering a test score based on their race, gender, or social class then turns this argument into more than just bias in a classroom. According to Question Pro, “Test bias can give unfair advantages to specific groups, which may distort the accurate assessment of abilities.” Bias limiting opportunities is more or so going against the bill of rights. No one has the right to strip others of their probability of being accepted into college or being offered that internship.

By limiting experiences to a specific stereotype/group, you are putting those people at an even greater disadvantage because they are not getting the chance to live through these life experiences. Therefore, they cannot relate to certain biased questions because of assumption.

Arguments

Some may say that students are individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences, and while bias can exist, it’s not a universal or defining factor in their educational outcomes. While this may be true, bias is starting to only focus on one certain group of a specific  background. Only focusing on one background then contributes to the diversity of a test being condensed and pinpointed.

Others may say that bias also acts as a catalyst for students to develop coping strategies, self-advocacy skills, and resilience. Some students may use bias or discrimination as a motivator to work harder, challenge stereotypes, or prove others wrong. While this also may be true, if students don’t know what the bias is affecting, how can they be motivated to work harder? If there is no set reason to why their scores are the way they are, it can then contribute to giving up and not caring.

Bias targets certain groups of people and puts them ahead of everyone else. This then affects everyone else that it is hurting. Setting students up against barriers that they have no control over makes it hard to find the flaws and work against them. This then contributes to mental health and stops them from experiencing certain opportunities. Now that you know about this, what are you going to do about it?