“Testing, testing,” says Linda Darling-Hammond at the start of her TEDxStanford talk. “How do you feel when I say those words?”

More than 500 people were in the audience at the CEMEX auditorium on May 17, listening to Darling-Hammond’s presentation on how the United States has taken a wrong turn: It gives its students more standardized tests than any other nation, and there’s little benefit.

Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Emeritus, points out that test-centric goals and teaching prepares kids for multiple-choice tests when the goal should be applying new knowledge to problem solve.

“Dozens of studies have shown that these sorts of standardized tests predict almost nothing about your success later in life,” she says, adding that today’s employers “need a lot more than the ability to pick one answer out of five.”

View the video of the talk to hear her analysis of the problem — and how to remedy it so that children receive a more meaningful education.

Darling-Hammond, who is also the faculty director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE), was one of two speakers from the Stanford Graduate School of Education speaking at the daylong TEDxStanford event. The other was Ben York, who was awarded his doctoral diploma from the GSE a month later and gave a presentation on using texts to help parents teach their children.

TEDxStanford featured a total of 18 speakers and seven performances.