Examinations like the New York State assessments, which are administered at a fixed time and whose content and criteria are uniform, play an exceedingly imperative role in wedding a system of measurement for assessing students across diverse populations. They supply a common standard for measuring student performance in different disciplines, which makes it feasible to compare students and schools based on the same assessment. These annual appraisal scores are vital because they hold schools accountable and give data insights to support what students learn in order to improve in academic areas where they demonstrate a need for help (Klein et al., 2005).

However, non-standardized appraisals can provide a unique lens into students' education and can help school better foster students’ curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and how to apply their knowledge in practical life situations. It is generally the case that teachers in New York City believe that these appraisals can compliment standardized assessments and thus can best support all students in the city's public schools (Iona et al., 2014). That being said, non-standardized educational assessments have distinct advantages and disadvantages as pertains to their impact on student creativity and curiosity, and no one kind is unequivocally superior to the other. These non-standardized test appraisals, which are based on the competitive grading system, normally focus on evaluating students on their mastery of math and English skills. However, teachers often encourage students to memorize and retain information for the short term or selectively focus only on a portion of the subject matter to save time, leading to shallow understanding, especially in subjects like math (Collins et al., 2015).

In this vein, they are usually not typically based on the desire to explore and the need to learn out of interest to attain some intrinsic goals and are, therefore, not aimed at appraising student curiosity or investigating how curiosity is timely interests (Collins et al., 2015). Nevertheless, these kinds of appraisals will inevitably evaluate solutions that avoid the required ways to attain a given goal, eventually killing a student's interest in learning a task in the long run only if the appraisal activity inhibits a student from exploring solutions that are unconventional. Also, a competition that stresses individual skills, like final-round performances, is likely to decrease a student's individual interest in the examination, class subject, reading, and writing in the future, whereas receiving achievement feedback in grading from the questions show would increase the student's interest (Collins et al., 2015). In a more practical sense, the tests pose a problem as they frequently hold learning curriculum and skews it to match what is tested mostly rather than fostering the genuine curiosity of students. For instance, some of the approaches included in Bastick and Ruskin’s comparison of Sweden and the United Kingdom's national assessment systems to highlight the fallacy of setting public exams on a vast curriculum has a tipping point where Negative accountability will suppress creativity, and perhaps this is the point can similarly point to tests where giving back all the possible information sequenced and memorized might substitute for the students’ intellectual curiosity to understand the problem it relates to and issues surrounding it (Bastick & Ruskin, 2019).

This may suppress the students’ interest in the topic and have adverse implications for their education going forward. As pertains to non-standardized appraisals, some corporate types of appraisals assess teamwork, which gives students the opportunity to leverage ;edge from their friends and improve their understanding of a subject matter. Also, these non-standardized appraisals can provide an opportunity for high ability students to be left behind and thus create a negative trail for other students as they see colleagues who drop out as a result of their inability to make it (Dufours & Lemi, 2023). That being said, in some areas, competitive appraisals can spur students' competencies to improve so long as they have the needed self-efficacy (Bandura et al., as cited in Bastick & Ruskin, 2019). Also, bigger students display increased creative competencies. Bassick and Ruskin also posit the need to consider creative assessment that allows students to utilize the cognitive skills to understand real-world problems and then research and authenticate the problem by thinking through it in a broader way. However, developing an appraisal of this nature is costs and resource-intensive.

On the other hand, it significantly enhances the student’s curiosity and creativity and supports an environment where the outcome of this exam is a deep understanding of their curriculum (Bastick & Ruskin, 2019). In this regard, creative thinking enables students to expand their problem-solving skills and comprehend how they learn (Williams et al., 2021). authentic assessments can enable children to apply information to address real problems so long as it is properly done. authentic appraisals can thus significantly enable students to apply the language they have learned in a model situation, which has been shown to help students remember the concepts they have learned. In light of this, it can be contended that across-the-board testing of schools in New York City does not meet the educational requirements and needs of the black and the poor children precisely because it does not engage them in activities that foster their learning experiences; hence, these children lack an intrinsic foundation for school success in the long-run, which is a critical predictor of the United States’ future economic sufficiency (Klein et al., 2005). Accordingly, It is imperative that the issue of the nature of the exam is of critical importance as it directly affects the interests of the student to learn.