Are the standardized tests good measure of academic ability of progress?
 

Please see if you can provide a critique of introduction.

Standardized testing has become a major part of admission process across universities and colleges around the world. Providing a well defined syllabus for the students, and ensuring that the exams judge primarily the conceptual understanding of students, they have been considered a successful alternative to essay modeled exams. Though as the standardized testing has proliferated, so have the questions around its effectiveness to judge a range of students with enormously varying backgrounds with strictly defined syllabuses. Moreover, questions persist if progression of academic ability can only be defined through a timed, a-personal testing procedure where no currency is given to personal history of a student's life, something to which a directly responsible teacher will be more aware. Further more, the linguistic issues due to a diverse ethnic formation of Pakistan raises its own concerns as to how to design a singular lingua-franca for a varied student population. Concretely, standardized testing fails to account for the multiple facets of a students' lives across their school years and the socio-economic background and can not be considered an apt representation of a progression of academic abilities.