Assessment myths and current fads: A rejoinder to a position paper on nonbiased assessment

The Region 9 Task Group position paper on unbiased assessment of culturally different children provided the impetus for describing a number of fallacies pertaining to psychological tests and the assessment procedure for educational purposes. Among the fallacies identified were that child advocacy necessitates the renunciation of standardized assessments, that diagnoses are either harmful to children or useless, that the use of norms in testing is detrimental to a child's well-being, that standardized tests are devoid of value since they fail to help teachers formulate appropriate teaching methodologies, and that the multidsciplinary assessment approach is necessarily the most efficacious. Although it has become highly fashionable to mount sweeping criticisms of standardized tests, a responsible position requires a more careful analysis of the assumptions underlying the use and misuse of these instruments.