One of the most common criticisms leveled against standardized assessment testing is that the test questions themselves are socioeconomically biased or that they favor one group over another due to differences in cultural experiences. This is of particular importance when considering an educational assessment of recent immigrants to a community or a standardized assessment of a community that includes members of different wealth strata. Because these students can lack the same cultural and economic contexts as the test's preparers, they may be at an inherent disadvantage when being assessed, regardless of their relative levels of preparation.
Classically, educational curricula have been conceptually based. The primary goal of an educator was to ensure students understood not only the raw facts but also the concepts underlying them and the relationships between them. With the advent of standardized assessment testing, educators find their progress measured not on the basis of individual progress by students but by aggregate or average scores achieved by students on standardized tests. This encourages what is known as "teaching to the test," an educational philosophy in which educators concern themselves not with teaching conceptual understanding but with the mechanical process of test-taking. To the detriment of students, a narrowing of the curriculum is a common result in these cases, as teachers spend less instructional time imparting useful knowledge than before standardized testing.
One of the most well-known standardized assessment tests is the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which is administered to high school students seeking college admission in the United States. Although it provides a means of comparing students' abilities with regards to fundamental educational principles such as reading, writing and mathematics, a major criticism of the SAT is that it falls short of its creators' claim that SAT scores are a strong predictor of grades in the first year of college. FairTest states that studies have shown that high school grades are a better means of predicting a student's first year grades than his scores on the SAT, which calls into question its utility as a predictive tool.
As standardized testing becomes more and more common in education and educators' performance is increasingly based on their students' achievement on such tests, grade inflation becomes more of an issue. When test results are tied to financial concerns like federal aid to school districts, educators are incentivized to "pad" the grades of students. This serves not only to dilute the predictive and assessment ability of the test, but it also helps to create a culture of frustration and negativity among teachers and students, which harms and degrades the quality of the educational environment. A study from Arizona State University in the early 1990s found that teachers whose students scored poorly on externally administered assessment tests suffered negative emotional consequences due to their perception that low student scores would be used against them, and, as a result, they were more likely to take extreme measures to avoid low scores.