Well, if you really think about it. Teachers nowadays are getting tremendous pressure to get their students to make high score on these standardized tests. Otherwise, their jobs will be in jeopardy as we have seen several states are trying to tie teachers' jobs with students' scores.

Standardized exams are structured to test one's mental skills such as short term memory. So a lot of times, you will find a student who just take a vocab memory class, or a prep class a month or two before the exam and end up scoring higher on these standardized tests than another student, who academically has a much higher overall GPA. That itself, is a true disadvantage of the test, simply because it clearly fails to measure a students's true academic ability.