"Play your cards right"
- Colleen Farris
- Oct 6
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 19
Who wins the game of high-stakes testing?
In 2012, I decided to become a high school teacher. In my state, a teaching degree was required—except for hard-to-fill positions such as family and consumer sciences. Since that was the job I was applying for, I only needed to pass the Praxis® exam for my content area. I registered and began studying diligently. While I was an expert in food, nutrition, and culinary arts, the Family and Consumer Sciences Praxis® exam covered several other areas, including apparel, environmental design, and human development. My mother had taught me sewing and decorating, but I had never taken an education or psychology course. I had a tremendous amount to learn.
I entered the testing facility prepared to do my best and left demoralized and furious. The reality that my entire future hinged on the results of a 120-question multiple-choice test struck me as absurd. After completing the exam, it became clear that no single test could fairly assess the knowledge needed to teach seven distinct content areas. Although I ultimately scored highly, the scoring system was opaque, and the entire experience felt dangerously arbitrary.
...the entire experience felt dangerously arbitrary.
If the exam could not measure whether I had the knowledge to teach my curriculum, what was the purpose of requiring a test score for hiring when clear evidence of my culinary-school training, years of industry experience, and record of managing a kitchen already existed? This question—and the intensely negative experience of taking the Praxis® exam—has remained with me.
Now, as a graduate student studying educational technology and assessment, I am beginning to understand why policymakers and institutions rely on high-stakes standardized tests like the Praxis®. These exams promise fairness, reliability, objectivity, and validity—the hallmarks of good assessment. But do they deliver? Even a brief review of the research on testing bias suggests that Praxis® exams can act as barriers to entry into the teaching profession for minoritized candidates (Wynter-Hoyte, 2020). This finding aligns with Au’s (2008) argument that the purpose of high-stakes testing is the replication of dominant power structures.
...failure to examine differences in outcomes ... is a failure to confront bias ...
Revisiting my experience prompted me to explore what the test makers themselves say about their products. I searched the Educational Testing Service (ETS) website for information on how they address disparities in test results and which groups are included in their fairness analyses. As Montenegro and Jankowski (2017) note, failure to examine differences in outcomes among groups is a failure to confront bias in assessment. The Technical Manual for the Praxis® Tests and Related Assessments (Educational Testing Service, 2024) indicates that data are analyzed by gender, race, and ethnicity. However, in the ETS International Principles for the Fairness of Assessments (Educational Testing Service, 2016), culture is mentioned only three times—and only in relation to international testing contexts.
Reconsidering my own worst assessment experience, I now realize that I took that Praxis® exam with the privilege of the test being “on my side.” If Black language and culture were fully recognized and valued within educational systems, how might ETS’s fairness analyses change (Baker-Bell, 2020)?
Proposed legislative changes in North Carolina, including removal of Praxis® requirements, have the potential to improve the outlook for those wishing to enter the teaching profession in North Carolina; however, recent Federal funding cuts significantly reduce the financial resources available for initiatives to increase teacher diversity (Public School Forum, 2025; Hui, 2025). These competing efforts illustrate the difficulty of addressing systemic barriers to teaching.
References
Au, W. (2008). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. Routledge.
Baker-Bell, A. (2020, April 18). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmbzPzip4Fs
Educational Testing Service. (2016). ETS international principles for the fairness of assessments. https://www.ets.org/pdfs/about/fairness-review-international.pdf
Educational Testing Service. (2024). Technical manual for the Praxis® tests and related assessments: September 2024. https://praxis.ets.org/on/demandware.static/-/Library-Sites-ets-praxisLibrary/default/pdfs/technical-manual.pdf
Hui, T. K. (2025, March 6). Trump cuts: NC schools lose Tens of millions in teacher grants | Raleigh News & Observer. newsobserver.com. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article300541584.html
Montenegro, E., & Jankowski, N. A. (2017). Equity and assessment: Moving towards culturally responsive assessment (Occasional Paper No. 29). National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. (NILOA) https://www.learningoutcomesassessment.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/OccasionalPaper29.pdf
North Carolina General Assembly. (2025, March 3). Remove testing requirement for teacher Lisc. (Public). https://www.ncleg.gov/Sessions/2025/Bills/Senate/PDF/S204v1.pdf
Public School Forum of North Carolina. (2025, April 25). April 25 policy updates. https://www.ncforum.org/april-25-policy-updates/2025/#:~:text=H573/S204%2C%20also%20known%20as%20%22Remove%20Testing%20Requirement,requirement%20for%20entry%20into%20educator%20preparation%20programs
WLOS News 13. (2024, July 17). Group suggests dropping Praxis Core entry exam from teacher certification. YouTube. https://youtu.be/2iFOnAK0PUY?si=zqTLhUNtJ9r6m3FO
Wynter-Hoyte, K. (2020). “Losing one African American preservice teacher is one too many”: A critical race analysis of support for Praxis Core as African American students speak out. Teachers College Record, 122(11), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146812012201107
