The myth is popular among education insiders who oppose high-stakes or externally mandated tests, but is based on just two studies conducted without controls that employed an obscure definition of “high stakes”. Both studies actually involved low-stakes tests administered without security protocols. Harms caused by belief in the myth include: diverting attention from a widespread problem (at least in the US) of lax security in standardized test administration; encouraging ineffective and detrimental test preparation procedures (e.g., excessive drilling on format, learning “tricks” based on format in lieu of learning subject matter) and supporting an exploitive, predatory test preparation industry; encouraging teachers to teach to “a broader domain” (“away from the test”) – content different from the publicly mandated standards they are legally and ethically obligated to teach; encouraging numerous “wild goose chase” research studies using an unreliable low-stakes test score trend to “audit” a high-stakes test score trend; repeated declarations that a past (and contradictory) research literature does not exist; and justifying the use of value-added measures, calculated from student low-stakes test score trends, to judge teacher performance.