President Barack Obama announced on Saturday that he plans to cap standardized testing at 2 percent of classroom time. The announcement comes on the heels of a new study released by the Council of Great City Schools, which revealed the pitfalls of over-testing children.

To Obama, learning should be "so much more than just filling in the right bubble;" right now, students will have taken 112 standardized exams by the time they graduate high school. These tests "take up too much time, preparation, and focus away from classroom learning," the president said in a video released on Facebook. So he'll work with states, school districts, teachers, and parents to bring that number done and ensure "we're not obsessing about testing."

According to the national study, which included the 66 largest school districts in America, students spend an approximate 20 to 25 hours taking standardized tests each school year. The amount of time spent studying and preparing in the classroom for these tests is currently unknown, and according to the council's executive director Michael Casserly, "how much constitutes too much time is really difficult to answer."

Obama's next step will be to meet with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, teachers, and school officials in the Oval office on Monday to figure out how to reduce testing time. Although the federal government won't be able to force states or districts into limiting testing, they may be able to make it easier for states to fulfill testing requirements. He believes districts can use other factors and approaches to assess student performance instead of filling in the infamous Scantron bubble.

Don't put your number two pencils down just yet: The Obama administration made it clear that they still support standardized tests as a necessary tool for assessing aptitude, but recognize more tests can be problematic. Students report higher levels of stress, sickness, and anxiety when they're constantly being tested and ranked against their peers. Plus, not all humans are built to learn and take tests the same, making it nearly impossible to present an even testing field.

Figuring out new testing procedures in the last decade has been trial-and-error, starting with former George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act; Bush's law mandated test preparation take place in the classroom. Even the Obama administration's recent "Race to the Top" initiative was met with massive pushback: Teachers argued that being evaluated based on their students' scores did not indicatively reflect the teacher’s effectiveness, and would be more of a "test and punish" approach.

"There's just a lot of testing going on, and it's not always terribly useful," said the director of the White House's domestic policy council Cecilia Munoz in an interview. "In the worst case, it can sap the joy and fun out of the classroom for students and for teachers."

Source: Hart R, Casserly M, Uzzell R, Palacios M, Corcoran A, and Spurgeon L. Student Testing in America's Great City Schools: An Inventory and Preliminary Analysis. Council of the Great City School. 2015.