From a set of guidelines provided by The Princeton Review to writers preparing practice versions of standardized tests:

Topics to Avoid in Passages, Items, and Art

• Violence (including guns, other weapons, and graphic animal violence)
• Natural disasters
• National tragedies (terrorist attacks, death of a president, etc.)
• War, dying, death, disease
• Drugs (including prescription drugs)
• Alcohol
• Tobacco and smoking
• Individuals who may be associated with drug use or with advertising of substances such as cigarettes and alcohol
• Name brands, trademarked names
• Junk food
• Fad diets
• Abuse, poverty, running away
• Divorce
• Socioeconomic advantages (e.g., video games, swimming pools, computers in the home, expensive vacations)
• Sex, including age-inappropriate stories about marriage, engagement, and having children
• Belching/burping, farting, spitting, etc.
• Religion
• Slavery (We can include slavery in history/social-studies material if the state curriculum standards cover slavery. Avoid it in reading passages. The term "enslaved people" is preferable to "slaves.")
• Rap music, rock concerts
• Complex discussions of esoteric topics
• Extrasensory perception, witchcraft
• Fortune-telling, superstition
• Dice and games involving dice (For math questions, use the term "number cubes" instead of "dice.")
• Halloween, religious holidays
• Aliens and UFOs
• Anything disrespectful, demeaning, moralistic, chauvinistic
• Anything depicting racial or cultural stereotypes (e.g., Native American in headdress and war paint)
• Anything depicting sexual stereotypes (e.g., girls shopping, a mother cooking dinner for a working father, girls overly concerned with dating or what boys think of them, anything accepting of a boy's aggressive behavior)
• Children coping with adult situations or decisions; young people challenging or questioning authority
• Losing a job, being fired
• Rats, roaches, lice, spiders
• Dieting, other concerns with self-image
• Evolution, prehistoric times, age of solar system, dinosaurs (We can include these topics in history and science materials if the state curriculum standards cover them. Avoid them in reading passages.)
• Any topic that is likely to upset students and affect their performance on the rest of the test

Topics to Avoid Because of Overuse

People:

• Johnny Appleseed
• James Smithson (Smithsonian Institution)
• John Muir
• John James Audubon
• Phillis Wheatley
• Roberto Clemente
• Alexander Graham Bell
• Helen Keller
• Harriet Tubman
• Louis Armstrong
• Jane Goodall
• Marie Curie
• Jacques Cousteau
• Amelia Earhart

Places and Things:

• cardiovascular exercise
• sports
• fad or extreme diets
• Galápagos Islands
• Inca civilization, Machu Picchu
• NASA

Themes:

• Child moves to new town
• Child starts a new school
• Child gets new pet
• Child ends story by saying, "That wasn't so bad after all!"

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