Why I don’t make tests for Guest Hollow

One of the most common questions we get asked via email and our Facebook groups is “Do you include tests and quizzes for your curriculum?”

We don’t, so I thought I’d write up a blog post as to WHY.

When I was homeschooling, tests and quizzes were almost always a component of most of the homeschool curricula I used. It just was assumed that they would be included. After all, how are you supposed to assess whether your kids “get” the material and if they are ready to move on?

I quickly discovered that tests and quizzes did NOT help in any way, and in fact they are often detrimental (in my opinion).

Let me back up a bit. OK, I’m going to back up more than a bit. Let’s take a huge detour in time to about 35-40 years ago, LOL.

I went to public school as a kid, and I have very clear memories of my childhood and teen years. Those clear memories often helped me when it came to teaching my own kids and currently help me create curriculum! In this post, I’m going to share some memories about testing in school, because that is when I first began to feel there was something “wrong” about testing.

I remember studying for and taking tests and quizzes throughout my years in school. I remember they were the focus of nearly everything. If you didn’t pass the tests (or do well on them), you didn’t get a good grade. I remember staying up the night before studying for a test, my hand cramping from writing notes and cramming material into my brain. I remember the butterflies in my stomach as everyone filed into class the next day. I remember nearly sweating as the test papers were handed out. I even remember subtly glancing at another student’s paper to see if their answers matched mine, my eyes sliding to the side and straining to see without being obvious.

I often did very well on most tests and remember being devastated when I didn’t.

One memory that sticks out in my head: I was sitting in geography class with my eyes watering with tears because I made an 89% (B+) instead of an A. Another memory: I was sitting in 2^nd year algebra with an F on a test (our school graded like this: 90-100 (A), 80-89 (B), 70-79 (C), and anything below 70 was an F). I remember feeling stupid. That’s what an F means, right? That you are too stupid to get it. (Well of course it doesn’t, but that’s how I felt at the time.)

Yet another memory: I was consoling myself when I made a B on a test thinking, “This is NOT going to matter when I’m 75 years old.” I was right, but back then I really had to dwell on that for comfort.

Tests were never fun, but they were necessary, right?

Perhaps they were in a public school setting, where a teacher is handling multiple classes of 20 or even more students at a time. There are very few other ways to easily assess a student’s “learning.” But what do they serve beyond that? Did the tests I took help me learn? Did they help get me back on track if I didn’t know something? I loved learning, but I hated tests. The more tests I took, the more my dislike for what I was studying grew.

It was clear to me, even back then, that tests:

• Shift the focus to grades rather than growth.
School becomes all about getting specific scores, NOT about true learning. Testing culture teaches students to ask, “What earns points?” instead of, “What helps me learn? What can I discover?”

• Promote test-taking tricks over understanding.
I’m sure you all know the tricks to eliminate the obvious wrong answers and then guess from there. Just because you guessed correctly doesn’t mean you knew the answer! Oh, and we all know that test creators often favor answer patterns. The answer is not likely to be A, A, A, A, A, A, A the entire way through, right? There are lots of strategies out there for passing tests, even when you aren’t comfortable with the material. There are entire books for students that are only about test taking strategies!

• Reward speed over thoughtfulness.
Oh, timed tests, how I hate you. LOL

• Encourage students to only study what’s on the test.
Hey, if it’s not on the test, why bother!? Tests are also often full of arbitrary questions that the teacher (or test designers) cherry-picked. Maybe you remember the answer to something that is NOT on the test.

• Create performance anxiety that blocks recall.
This happened to me sometimes. I’d remember a fact AFTER I turned the test back in. UGH!

• Discourage risk-taking and curiosity.
Tests can teach you to be AFRAID OF FAILURE when failure is actually a terrific opportunity to learn and grow! Failure is an integral part of learning!

• Penalize divergent thinking.
I can’t tell you how many times I knew what the test “wanted” me to put down as an answer, even though there were other possible ways to think about specific problems. This is particularly true with history and other social sciences, where there are different ways of interpreting material.

• Treat knowledge as a fixed snapshot.
Just because a student gets a good grade on a test doesn’t give you the overall picture of what they truly understand. A timed test records what you can recall that day. It can’t really grade how you think, how you improve with feedback, and what you can do over multiple steps or in real tasks. Learning becomes centered around a single moment on paper vs. a learning journey in real life.

• Provide little actionable feedback.
Tests are feedback for the teacher, really…not the student. How many students do you know that pore over test results to figure out the correct answers afterward? In school it was all about moving on to the next topic and the next test, not working for true mastery.

• Disadvantage students with learning differences, processing speed differences, or test anxiety.
There were many times I would have made a much better grade if I had had more time to think things through instead of the 30 minutes allotted for a 4-page test!

When homeschooling my daughter, I noticed she often forgot things she knew really well, due to testing anxiety. Studies have shown that in some students, cortisol levels drop during test-taking, which makes concentration difficult —kind of like a switch being thrown as soon as a student sits down for a test, making their score an unreliable account of their knowledge.

• Invite unhealthy comparison and shame.
I can’t tell you how many times I was brought to tears for not achieving the grade I wanted. Grades were super important to me. They were part of my identity (I was generally a good student). Making a bad grade on a test made me feel like I wasn’t good at something. Like I couldn’t be good at it. Those other kids that did well – they were smart when it came to xyz. I wasn’t. (That’s not true, but it’s the way I thought at the time.) It was super demotivating. That’s not how all students respond, but it’s how many do.

• Consume instructional time, reducing practice and projects.
Most of us have heard about teaching to the test (spending huge amounts of time preparing for a test vs. actual subject learning). It’s a real thing, and it takes away valuable learning time.

• Encourage cramming then forgetting.
Yeah, that chemistry test I studied for? I did well, but did I remember it all 6 months or a year later? Um. No.

• Fail to capture real-world skills, collaboration, and creativity.
We’re all lining up to take written tests all the time in the real world, after all. 😉 After you learn a new recipe, you are just itching to take a test about it. Right? How would that make you feel about trying a new recipe if you HAD to take a test afterward? Would you be more or less motivated?

• Reinforce misconceptions when items contain plausible wrong answers without feedback.
There are studies that show this. Do a search for multiple choice testing and negative results.

• Create adversarial relationships between students and learning and their teachers.
When tests are the focus of learning, many students quickly learn to dislike a particular subject or learning itself (since it’s associated with the feelings surrouding test taking).

• Don’t take into account that you may have made a calculation error.
My brain tends to mix up numbers on occasion, leading to calculation errors. On math tests I’d often get things wrong, even though I understood the underlying processes thanks to a single number that got turned around in my head. According to the test, I didn’t know the concepts, even though I did.

• Increase the temptation to cheat/be dishonest.
Cheating on tests (and in school classes) is rampant.

My daughter shared her experiences about college. She said students shared test answers when the teacher wasn’t looking. One student bartered for others to do her homework so she could focus on sports. Others paid people to write essays and do homework.

Multiple large surveys over many years show that a majority of students report some form of cheating, often 60 to 70 percent. Cheating has become even easier now with smart watches, phones, and other ways of sneaking in notes and answers.

Homeschoolers “cheat” as well, but usually it’s a teen who reports their work has been completed, only for a parent to discover nothing has been done for the week or even for months!

You have to ask: Why are students cheating? While there are a number of reasons, one of them that stands out is because the focus is ON THE GRADE, not the actual learning.

Homeschooling my kids reinforced my negative opinion about testing.

 Tests didn’t add much (if any) value to my kids’ education. Multiple studies (many which are available online after a quick search) back this up.

I didn’t like them. My kids didn’t like them. They didn’t help them learn anything.

Now let me take a quick detour to add that kids don’t always get to like what they are doing or learning. Doing things that are uncomfortable or hard is part of life. That said, tests often felt like fluff—and that’s exactly what they were. They were mostly designed to help me as the teacher, not to help my kids actually learn the material. And by “help me,” I don’t mean they were meant to improve how I taught. Their only purpose was to narrowly assess and to give me a convenient shortcut in grading and record-keeping.

I’ll share another little excerpt from my life: There was a time when we homeschooled through a charter school. At first, the charter school allowed us a TON of freedom as homeschoolers. We received a helpful chunk of money we could spend on supplies, books, and such and in exchange we had to meet with an “educational specialist” once a month and turn in a record of our children’s learning. It was fine if we used religious materials, but we couldn’t include those in our record keeping or spend school funds on those items. Other than that, the school didn’t bug me about what I taught the kids or how I taught it.

For a while it was a great partnership. That changed when the state mandated annual standardized tests for charters. The charter school then increased the pressure on parents to ensure students not only passed those tests but also scored well. They started demanding students learn things along the state’s timetable (what they wanted to be taught in specific grade levels).

To my eyes, the entire focus of the charter school changed. As in many public schools, it became about testing vs. learning. It became stressful. The school wanted more check-ins. They wanted to administer practice tests. They started sticking their nose into what we were teaching and when. They started creating packages of “approved” materials, just so students would get better scores.

The once-relaxed relationship that many families had enjoyed became significantly strained. We decided to quit and take a better approach—one that actually fit our goals. I wanted to homeschool my kids, not run a quasi–public school at home.

Doing well on state tests did not tell anyone about what my kids were capable of! It just showed that they did well on tests (and they did, LOL, even my daughter who used to freeze up when it was time to take them).

I still wasn’t entirely against tests. A lot of our curriculum contained tests, especially math. It was after many years of experience that I realized tests, in my opinion, are just not necessary, even in math.

I could see everything I needed to know about how my kids were doing in math just by looking at their daily work. I didn’t a test to figure that out.

I truly believe that the culture of testing and grades pushes students to focus on the wrong things. Instead of embracing the journey of learning—with all its ups, downs, uneven progress, and even failures—students often work only to earn a score.  That’s not the kind of learning or effort I wanted to encourage.

So, eventually I stopped using them.

I want to quickly address that there are some kids who LOVE tests (and/or grades). They love the challenge. They think of it as feedback. They want some system of measurement. ETC. That’s why homeschooling is so great! We can customize things for our kids and use the tools that help them learn best. For those kids, feel free to test away! I still would not make that any type of a focus, though.

That takes me to Guest Hollow…

Guest Hollow homeschooling is all about the journey: exploring, discovering, and following little rabbit trails or digging deeper when curiosity strikes. It’s about helping students learn to love learning and to think for themselves. That’s a process. When I create a curriculum for Guest Hollow, I draw on everything I learned while homeschooling my own children and tutoring others, and I pass those years of experience on to you—along with the new insights I continue to gather along the way. 😊

And one thing I learned is that you don’t, in most cases, need tests or quizzes or anything remotely like either one of those.

Yes, that sometimes makes things harder for a busy parent. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “How will I know they actually learned it/read it/did the work?”

There are lots of ways to find out what your kids know. They can narrate, keep learning journals, draw pictures, explain things to you, and talk them through. I often would see my kids re-enacting something they learned in history with Legos and Playmobil entirely unprompted. Sometimes they’d relate facts to me months after we covered something just in the course of daily life.

Homeschooling parents are usually able to be with their children most of the time. If not, it doesn’t take much to check in and talk with them a bit.

At the end of the day, tests and quizzes are not the heart of learning. Real learning shows up in conversations, in projects, in the spark you see when your child connects an idea to something in everyday life. It shows up when they share what they’ve read at the dinner table or tell you why a recipe didn’t work thanks to what they learned in chemistry.

One mom recently shared in our Facebook High school Group about a conversation she had with her son, who is in his first year of college and living in the honors dorm. She said he has loved chemistry since he was seven and, over the years, had worked through several different curriculums, including our Chemistry in the Kitchen Curriculum (where he focused mostly on the videos and book selections). She said his dorm mates have been strugging with their college chemistry course. Even though her son isn’t enrolled in the class, he’s been helping to tutor them because he can explain the concepts in a way they can understand. Why? He told her it’s beacause of Guest Hollow and how we approached chemistry topics! 😍

It’s stories like this that show what true learning looks like!

So no, Guest Hollow doesn’t include tests and quizzes and that’s intentional. We want to give your kids the freedom to explore, question, and enjoy the process of discovery without the stress of test scores hanging over them. Our goal is to help them build a lifelong love of learning, one rabbit trail at a time.

If you’re ever worried about whether your kids are “getting it,” rest assured that in most cases, you should have a pretty good sense. Their words, their play, their creativity, the things they talk about, and their curiosity can tell you far more than a test ever could.

Here is to raising lifelong learners who do not need a test to prove what they know!

I would love to hear about your experiences with tests in the comments (good and bad)!

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