The cost of test culture

By Herman M. Lagon

The silence before a major test is not calm. It is cautious—the kind that tells you students are trying not to make mistakes before they even begin. Nothing looks different—the boards, the teacher, the lesson—but the mood has already turned. The room starts behaving like a waiting shed for scores. In too many schools, that mood does not visit once in a while. It moves in. And when testing becomes the dominant culture of education, the damage is not always dramatic.

Sometimes it shows up in simpler, sadder ways: a child who stops asking side questions because they are “not included,” a teacher who skips a lively detour because “it might not come out,” a class that learns how to choose A, B, C, or D but struggles to explain why life outside the questionnaire keeps refusing neat choices. Tests are not evil. They have uses. But once the test starts acting like the boss of the classroom, learning quietly resigns. And as a new academic year begins this month, that familiar silence before a test is once again settling into classrooms across the country—quietly reminding us what kind of culture we are about to repeat, or rethink.

Anybody who has taught long enough has seen the ritual. The review season arrives, and suddenly a lesson becomes narrower, flatter, and more hurried. A Grade 6 class in a public school may be discussing a poem, but the real target becomes identifying the “correct” literary device from four choices. A senior high student may understand a social issue deeply, but if he cannot shade fast enough or decode the trick in a multiple-choice stem, his intelligence gets downgraded to a number. I have seen bright learners who could explain a concept beautifully in Hiligaynon or Filipino freeze when forced into stiff test English. I have seen teachers with genuine classroom gifts reduce themselves to item-drilling machines because systems, rankings, reputations, and next year’s MOOE hover above them like unpaid bills. That is the problem with a test-driven culture: it does not only discipline students into compliance. It also domesticates teachers. Instead of designing learning that wakes up thought, many are pressured to coach students into surviving formats. The classroom turns into a rehearsal hall for predictability.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: we test a lot, but learn too little. PISA 2022 reports that only 16 percent of Filipino students reach baseline proficiency in math, 24 percent in reading, and 23 percent in science. Teachers already know why—many students can recall, but cannot reason. EDCOM II reinforces this, with nearly three in ten Filipinos struggling with basic real-life tasks. The issue is not quantity of tests. It is quality of learning.

Testing is not the enemy. A simple quiz can show who understands and who is just guessing. But the problem starts when tests are treated as final judgment. UNESCO has long said assessments should help improve learning, not just rank it. They should guide, not define. Because when scores become everything, students start believing they are their numbers. In many classrooms, that pressure is real. Some learn to play along. Others begin to doubt themselves. My own work on school culture has shown how some tests reward familiarity with patterns more than real thinking. And when learning turns into a game of guessing what comes out, not everyone gets to win.

This is where the teacher’s role deserves rescuing from old clichés. The best teachers are not merely distributors of content or human answer keys with better handwriting. They are designers of encounters with knowledge. They ask the question that slows the room down. They notice the child who got the answer wrong for an interesting reason. They make space for uncertainty instead of treating it like a stain. In PISA 2022, students reported relatively high levels of teacher support, with 79% saying their teacher shows interest in every student’s learning and 81% saying extra help is given when needed, That is not a small thing. It tells us there is relational strength in our classrooms even amid structural weakness. The challenge is to protect that strength from being flattened by mechanical assessment cultures. A teacher facilitating learning does not mean a teacher doing less. It means doing the harder work of listening, scaffolding, redirecting, contextualizing, and knowing when not to answer too quickly. It means treating a lesson not as a delivery receipt but as a live exchange.

A facilitative classroom may look ordinary, but it works differently. It does not begin with “This will be in the test,” but with questions that matter—why floods stay longer in some barangays, or why change is harder to compute in real life than in a textbook. This is where learning becomes real. When students discuss, revise, and explain, ideas stay longer. As UNESCO notes, feedback should guide progress, not just judge it. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) adds that feedback works best when it is tied to clear goals. At its best, assessment supports learning, not threatens it.

In the classroom, this is no longer a small issue. Teachers juggle oversized classes, paperwork that never ends, side assignments, and learners carrying burdens far beyond school. EDCOM II has already warned that weak literacy, teacher shortages, and poor matches in deployment are making real learning harder to sustain. In that setting, standardized tests can feel reassuring because numbers look orderly. But order on paper is not always learning in real life. A school may raise scores and still miss the student who cannot apply what was memorized at home or in daily life. Then came AI, exposing another hard truth: many traditional assessments reward format more than understanding. If a bot can fake competence, then maybe the task was too shallow to begin with. Education now has to value deeper work—reasoning, process, voice, and judgment.

There is another reason this cannot wait: AI has exposed how fragile many of our assessments have been. If a machine can write a decent essay or solve routine tasks in seconds, then we have to ask—were we measuring learning, or just rewarding those who knew the pattern? UNESCO calls for a shift toward deeper thinking—judgment, creativity, ethics. Because once a task can be gamed, it will be. Classrooms must now move toward work that demands reflection and application. Messier than bubble sheets, yes—but closer to real thinking, and to real life.

This does not mean we abandon tests altogether. Students still need structure, and teachers still need evidence. But tests should be used with proportion, not worship. Let them guide learning, not define it. No single score can capture a child fully. Education is not a factory audit—it is human work, slower and more complex than numbers suggest.

Rigor should come with care, not fear. A test score should open a conversation, not close one. Learning grows where students are allowed to struggle without shame and think without fear. Tests can diagnose and guide, but they should not take over. Because once they do, classrooms begin to shrink—fewer questions, fewer risks, less imagination. The real failure is not getting an answer wrong. It is losing the desire to ask. The best classrooms do more than prepare students for exams. They prepare them to face a world that has no answer key.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a ”student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.