At present, national competency standards and tests are officially tools for education. They are expected to be able to raise equity and quality in education. Competencies in terms of those standardized tests are regarded as the gradable/increasable disposition (cf. Otto/Schrödter 2010). Referring to Hopmann (2007), these competencies define a combined, fixed meaning for each matter which narrows the teacher’s scope of action in trying to make contents meaningful to the students. The student’s task is to harmonize their different life-worlds with instructional demands, which means that they have to create the meaning of the taught matter. Standardized testing sets a framework where only a certain meaning counts as a correct answer. Furthermore, the standards represent a kind of benchmark or “bar”and performance below this bar is defined as deficient and implies the need for “correction”. Instruction could then be regarded as a way to compensate the students’ deficiencies and lead them to the “norm”. In doing so, socially constructed otherness is transformed into an individual liability and is not made into a pedagogical question (cf. Young 2010). The presentation analyzes various marginalizing didactical processes within the context of standardized testing and national competency standards, with special reference to Austria.