| Sumario: | This Counterpoint challenges the claim that international standardised assessments benefit both learners and teachers. While acknowledging that such tests are unlikely to disappear, we argue that they harm language education. We first deconstruct the historical myths used to legitimise standardisation, revealing it as a rhetorical move that substitutes genealogy for evidence. We then trace the resulting harms in three ways: mechanistically, through overstandardisation that flattens language and threatens validity; systemically, through the economic machinery of the testing-industrial complex, where 'edu-washing' casts profit as benevolence; and ideologically, through a fiction of fairness that conflates sameness with justice, concealing raciolinguistic, and algorithmic biases. Against this, we propose a human-centred re-orientation of assessment, where validity is both statistical and ethical, and fairness an ongoing relationship rather than a calculation. Reform, we suggest, will not come from better metrics but from empathy, from a willingness to remember what it feels like to be measured.
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