Number 2 Pencil

Can you hear me now? Good! The answer to item 1 is "d".

Caveon has a new Cheating in the News newsletter out. One of the big articles linked this week is Newsweek International's "The Perfect Score," which focuses on the prevalence of cheating in student communities outside the US. A must-read.

Closer to home, there's the cheating episode in Texas that shows why schools should confiscate cell phones before handing out test booklets. I'm actually a bit surprised to discover that some states are only now developing policies regarding the use of devices such as cell phones during exams.

Who's to blame for cheating?

Scott of the Daily Ablution has thoughts on a recent Guardian article that advances a novel theory about "the culture of cheating" in the UK.

From the article:

...Tragically this culture of cheating afflicts children from a very early age. Children as young as seven or eight arrive at school showing off polished projects that have benefited from more than a little help from parents.

But parents are not entirely to blame. From day one in primary school they are told that the performance of their children is intimately linked to how much support they get at home. In a desperate attempt to improve standards of education, parents' concern for their children is manipulated to draw them in as unpaid teachers. The outsourcing of education by schools encourages a dynamic where many parents become far too directly involved in producing their children's homework.

Scott notes that the researcher who advances this theory, Prof. Furedi, is "correct that the internet is not a sufficient moral force to create a society of cheats." However, is it correct to assume that parental overinvolvement is a sufficient enough force? Scott says no:

...I think the answer is no - something deep, systemic and much more unfortunate has happened to the society at large, with ramifications that go beyond those of cheating in universities...

What has brought about the moral change in question is precisely this attitude: that immoral actions are no longer the responsibility of the individual concerned, who is perceived as an innocent let down by the system's deficiencies - deficiencies which can be corrected by social expenditure of resources.

This philosophical position, a mainstay of the academic left, is also prevalent among left-leaners in general; working together, such groups and individuals have largely succeeded in the creation of a society based on the principle of individual blamelessness.

A society, in other words, in which media coverage of cheating teachers always include quotes from "experts" explaining that this is the fault of our "testing culture;" the poor teachers just can't help themselves.

Sneaking a peek at the test items

A "sneak peek" sounds like an innocuous thing - but not when it comes to the Maryland State Assessment:

Two fourth-grade teachers have been removed from their classrooms after Carroll County school officials found that the pair had given copies of questions from a state achievement test to other teachers and pupils before the exam.

A teacher at Linton Springs Elementary School in Sykesville acknowledged that she had taken notes from the fourth-grade Maryland State Assessment reading exam last year while working at another school, Carroll schools Superintendent Charles Ecker said Monday. The teacher used the notes to create worksheets for her pupils for this year's tests, Ecker said. The tests were administered from March 13-22.

Interesting that the names are being withheld from the press. And it's interesting, but not the least bit surprising, that the quoted experts rush to blame the current culture of testing for this mess, rather than a lack of ethics on the part of the teachers involved. And this despite the fact that the teachers would have not been penalized had their students not done well. I don't think our "culture of testing" forces teachers and students to cheat. I think our culture of cheating is aided by all the testing criticism in the media today. Everything said by the "experts" quoted by this article would absolve a teacher of personal responsibility if they succumbed to the urge to leak test items to students.

Oh, and why was copying last year's exam such a helpful cheating tool?

After they noticed similarities between the worksheets and this year's test, the Mount Airy teachers alerted the principal.

Emphasis mine. If we really think teachers are so helpless against the temptation to cheat, it might be better to, you know, not use the same test form twice in two years.

(via the Education Wonks)

Camden's cheaters

Well, I suppose this is good news for the College Board - pushes the SAT off the front pages - but it's terrible news for quite a lot of other people:

Almost from his first day as principal at Charles Brimm Medical Arts High in Camden, Joseph Carruth found himself sounding an alarm over grade fixing and test-score rigging - allegations that have embroiled the district in scandal. He and another administrator at the school discovered an alleged grade-fixing scheme within weeks of Carruth's arrival in July 2004, according to court documents. Twelve seniors at the school for high performers had apparently graduated with failing grades.

Six months later, Carruth has told state education and local prosecutors, an assistant superintendent pressured him to alter the 2005 state High School Proficiency Assessment after students finished it, giving him step-by-step instructions on how he was to cheat. Carruth has said he refused to take part, according to sources familiar with the allegations. He even strapped on a wire for criminal investigators trying to implicate that district official.

It's uglier, and it's not going to get better soon:

The New Jersey Department of Education is investigating irregularities in standardized testing. One investigation involves allegations by the principal of Charles Brimm Medical Arts High, Joseph Carruth, that he was pressured to rig math scores on the state High School Proficiency Assessment last year. Carruth refused to join in the alleged scheme.

The other involves dramatic improvement in the test results of at least two Camden elementary schools. The state began that investigation after The Inquirer asked the state to verify results. One city school had the highest fourth-grade math score in the state. That investigation has expanded to a dozen schools outside Camden.

Sending the wrong message

Camden (NJ) school administrators get a public spanking:

The nearly 18,000-student system has long been plagued by a high dropout rate, low test scores, and violence. The district has been under state oversight since 1999. Superintendent Annette Knox has been criticized for everything from her handling of racial tension to her $185,000 salary in a city where nearly half the children live at the poverty level.

With so much holding them back, is it possible for so many Camden kids to surge so far ahead so fast? That's what my colleagues Melanie Burney and Frank Kummer wondered as they reviewed statewide standardized tests results from 2004-05. Crunching the numbers, they noticed dramatic performances at two Camden elementary schools, H.B. Wilson and U.S. Wiggins.

Wilson posted the highest average fourth-grade math scores in the state, besting more than 1,300 elementary schools. Wiggins placed sixth.
In fourth-grade science, both schools posted 100 percent proficiency, ranking far ahead of the district average and putting them in the ranks of traditionally high-performing schools in wealthy suburbs...

...my colleagues' questions sparked a state inquiry and the discovery that education officials already had been looking into a related issue at Charles Brimm Medical Arts High School brought up by a most unlikely tattletale: principal Joseph Carruth. A high-ranking district administrator reportedly pressured Carruth to help rig scores of last year's 11th-grade tests. Carruth resisted and reported the incident to state education officials...

...would they really be so stupid as to fake success so grand even Camden cheerleaders would doubt it? Much as he'd like to believe them, Angel Cordero said, he thinks the numbers are just too good to be true. And that makes the Camden education activist (and frequent Knox critic) both sad and mad.

As well he should be.

Those silly cameras are making it hard for me to concentrate on my crib sheets

Boy, is THIS ever an inventive excuse:

A Bosnian university's decision to clamp down on widespread cheating by installing surveillance cameras has sparked complaints from students, a professor said. "We have already received complaints from some students who claimed it is difficult to concentrate on their exams while being filmed" a week after the cameras were put in place in the economics faculty, said Banja Luka University's Goran Radivojac...

"Cheating in exams is a part of our Balkan mentality and it will take years to change students' mentality, but I believe that corruption in our faculty will be minimised by this," he added.

Is that really something you want to mention to a reporter?

Experts at cheating

Caveon's Cheating in the News has been updated. Featured is the Wall Street Journal's article on students hiring experts to do their homework.

I finally found a sound bit to go with cheating news - a snippet from Mystery Science Theater 3000's coverage of an old 1950's short on how bad it is to copy test answers from your friends. When the hapless cheater gets caught in this film, Crow, Tom Servo, and Mike sound the alarm as follows.

(Note - I have no idea how to best store sound files to allow people to easily access them online. If you have any tips, let me know).

The first cheaters of 2006

Caveon's Cheating in The News feature has been updated. I had heard about the GMAT updating of test security measures, and it's about time; neither fingerprints nor digital photographs are unheard of in the testing biz.

Also featured is a story of an ex-teacher who helped a principal become an ex-principal by revealing secret taped converstations about cheating on state exams, and a worrisome tale of would-be nurses who took advantages of items on the Internet.

My question for the day: If you're training your students to respond to test items that aren't even asked, is that still considered "teaching to the test"?

Cheating their way out of a job

Indiana is not buying the "testing-with-high-stakes-means-we-have-to-expect-that-some-poor-teachers-will-be-forced-to-cheat" line:

The consequences for Indiana teachers who help students cheat on their federally mandated tests are about to get much stiffer. From now on, teachers caught in the act could lose their credentials and, as a result, their jobs.

The policy shift underscores the state's resolve to stop educators from trying to manipulate scores on the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus, which starts today. Until now, educators caught corrupting the system were not punished by the state. Instead, discipline was left up to local school systems and most violators went unpunished. The threat to revoke a license is one in a number of measures the state has adopted.

Good.

And in other cheating news, check out Caveon's latest cheating roundup. Doug Craigen's list of "Worst Cheaters Ever" is classic.

Lending a too-helping hand

What happens to teachers who help their students cheat? Well, in at least one California case, the result was a new job:

The Vista Unified School District has reprimanded and transferred a teacher at Mission Meadows Elementary School after a district investigation found that the teacher provided improper help to students and caused "irregularities" on state standardized tests, according to a letter district officials sent to the state...

...the district said that its investigation into a teacher's handling of the 2005 Standardized Testing and Reporting exam or STAR test found:

* The teacher admitted to having multiplication tables hanging on the wall during the math portion of the standardized test.
* In response to a specific allegation, the teacher said a misunderstanding may have led to one student's perception that she reviewed the standardized test and had students change their answers. The teacher said she reviewed each test to ensure that answers were filled in and that there were no stray marks.
* However, eight out of 17 students interviewed individually about the math portion of the STAR test said they were told which answers to correct when the teacher reviewed the tests.

The district's investigation concluded that testing irregularities did occur on the STAR tests...

The letter said the district reprimanded the teacher by placing her on administrative leave for the last two weeks of the school year that ended in June. The district also transferred the teacher from Mission Meadows to another school for this 2005-06 school year. Cowles declined to name the teacher or where she was transferred to, and said he had no comment on any personnel matters.

At least one parent is unhappy with the way the situation has been handled, in part because she didn't hear the outcome until she read about it in the papers.

Cheating news roundup

Test security expert Professor Greg Cizek has submitted his report on test security to the Texas Education Agency, and it's definitely worth a read. I've had the pleasure of meeting Greg in person, and I can't recommend his work enough.

Caveon's Cheating in the News has been updated as well. Apparently, some Russians have learned from the errors of their peers and are presumably stuffing their shirts less enthusiastically.

Bad ideas all around

Apparently polygamy and fraud go together, at least when it comes to allocating school funds:

Arizona officials already have seized a truckload of records, computers and other material in a criminal investigation of the school district serving an isolated polygamist community in northwestern Arizona. Now, the state is preparing to take over the district itself...

That came after the district missed deadlines to file budget reports to the state and ran out of money, leaving teachers unpaid for several months last year. The paychecks resumed after an insurer began to cover the district's IOUs...The district is located in Colorado City, Ariz., where a polygamist sect - the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - controls the town and the schools...

...There are indications the district's money has been misdirected, with district facilities and equipment used for personal gain...there also are allegations that adults filled out standardized test forms last spring.

Misusing the funds sound like it was the last straw for the Arizona government.

On the plus side, I hear the Moulin Rouge has an opening

Oh, man, I don't even know where to start with this clown.

A young Russian man who dressed in women’s clothes to sit an exam for his sister was caught after his oversize bust gave him away, Interfax news agency reported.

The youth’s “unusually prominent female features”, and heavy make-up drew security guards’ attention and they stopped him sitting the paper, Yasen Zasursky, dean of Moscow State University’s journalism faculty, told the agency. A thorough check revealed that the girl was in fact a young man trying to pose as a girl to pass the exam for his sister. The dean said that security were especially suspicious because the applicant’s breasts were of “incomparable proportions”.

They thought that cheat notes could be hidden inside her clothing. However, it turned out that the breasts were fake. The young man was barred from the entry exam and his sister was also struck off the university entrant list for cheating.

Thoughts:
1. There must not be a lot of breast implant surgeries at Moscow State, not if having breasts of "incomparable proportions" is enough to warrant suspicion.
2. Moscow State has a journalism program?
3. How dumb do you have to be to dress in drag to cheat on an exam, and get caught because you made your fake breasts too big? Does anyone else find it creepy that this clown pumped his "breasts" up because that what he thought his sister's chest looked like?
4. "Heavy makeup" also aroused suspicion? Just how bad did this guy look? Has he ever actually seen a real woman? Other than his sister, I mean?
5. The sister is obviously none too bright either, not only because she needed her brother to sit for her exam, but also because she apparently let him walk out the door looking like a cross between Dolly Parton and Tammy Faye Bakker.
6. There's GOT to be a photo on the Net soon. If anyone finds it, send it to me. (Is there a Russian equivalent of The Smoking Gun?)

How many students actually graduate?

Jay Mathews discusses the dishonorable (but long-standing) practice of fudging the numbers:

Many states are finding creative ways to misinterpret the rules for reporting their statistics so that their school children seem to be doing wonderfully even though that often is not the case.

This is the latest version of a game that has been popular since Alexander Hamilton and James Madison created the federal system as a playground for generations of political mischief makers like themselves...

Now there is a new report on how states are hiding their feeble high school graduation rates under thick glops of statistical nonsense. It is "Getting Honest About Grad Rates: How States Play the Numbers and Students Lose," by Daria Hall of the Education Trust, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that works for higher academic achievement, particularly for low-income and minority children. The report is available on the Education Trust website.

No Child Left Behind tries to encourage high schools to improve their graduation rates, but unlike its test score improvement provisions, it does not threaten much action if they don't. It turns out this is like telling all the thieves in the neighborhood that you have turned off your burglar alarm. No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001 because many states ignored similar rules in the 1990s that had no muscle behind them. That is happening again with graduation rates, Hall said.

The report is here. It makes for eye-opening reading, especially when you realize that some states don't count pre-senior-year dropouts when calculating graduation rates, and other states don't report graduation rates at all.

When a parent goes too far

It's bad enough when kids cheat on the NY Regents exams; it's worse when parents - who happen to be school administrators - are willing to help their kids do so:

Long Island school officials say they caught a sophomore cheating on a Regents examination last week and were quickly able to trace the cribbed answers - written on his hand - to the student's father, an assistant superintendent in charge of exams and answer sheets in another district.

The alleged scheme was disclosed yesterday when the father, Isben Jeudy, 40, of East Northport, was charged with official misconduct in First District Court of Nassau County, in Hempstead. He pleaded not guilty and was released on his own recognizance. His lawyer did not return a call seeking comment.

How many things are wrong with this picture? First off, the father's willingness to help his son cheat is not only sending the wrong message, but is also an admission that he doesn't think his son has what it takes to pass the exam. Next, the father jeopardized his own career to do so. Finally, the exam form that father was in charge of is now suspect - if he gave answers to his kid, maybe he (or his kid) gave them to other students as well.

Update: The Education Wonks, for whom this topic hits close to home, are asking the right questions:

One question that needs to be asked is this: Why would the answers to such a high-stakes assessment be in the unsupervised custody of any school site or district administrator? Common sense would seem to indicate that those who would have an inherent interest in an examination (such as school site/district administrators) should never be in the possession of test answers....

Considering the high-stakes nature of these examinations, security should be a priority...This whole sad episode (and possibly others that have gone unreported) should have been avoided.

But were there hanging chads?

Reader S. notes that administrator's penchants for cheating have extended beyond tests to student elections (and no, we're not talking about the movie Election here):

His opponent was known throughout school as "the perfect kid," Scott Dubnoff said. Smart. Athletic. Popular. Even Dubnoff liked Dave Dobrosky. But Dubnoff had thrown his hat in the ring for student government president of Mountain Lakes High School, and he planned to win.

The votes were cast, but who won for sure is now a matter of dispute. School administrators say Dubnoff lost, but they can't prove it because the ballots were thrown away. Dubnoff says he won and insists he can prove it -- because his father dug the ballots out of the school's trash bin.

Hoo-boy. Sounds like the educrats didn't appreciate Dubnoff's sense of humor:

Dubnoff said he knew that to defeat his opponent, he would have to be creative. Instead of delivering a standard, straightforward speech -- the kind he expected from his competitor -- he would be different.

"Different" meant walking on stage in a generalissimo-style uniform, flanked by two friends dressed as Secret Service agents, and riding the joke for all it was worth. "The spirit of our collective mass has made it known that I am the Chosen One, the manifest of our destiny here in Mountain Lakes," said Dubnoff, who often goes by "Mitch." "Under me, the Mitch Coalition will march into the dawning of a new era: A utopia where homework, tests and punctuality are henceforth irrelevant."

He made his classmates promises -- some sincere, others intentionally ludicrous..."I was up against the best guy," Dubnoff said. "I wanted it to be big and I wanted it to be funny and I wanted people to talk about it."

The school has since made Dubnoff and Dobrosky co-presidents, which sounds like an admission that someone fudged the numbers, or that the school admins can't count.

A little "creative" bookkeeping

We keep hearing about how awful all these mandatory standardized tests are for today's youth. Why, then, are most of the episodes of cheating we hear about based on adult misbehavior? Are the teachers really cheating the most? Some say yes - depending on how broadly we define "cheating:"

Last week, Esther Jones, the principal of Santa Ana's Saddleback High School, circulated a memo asking teachers to reassess the failing grades of 98 students in hopes of helping the school meet the federal No Child Left Behind Act's standards. The note read, "please review your records for these students and determine if they would merit a grade of 'D' instead of a failure."

Sadly, this isn't surprising. Instead it unfortunately reaffirms an increasingly common practice: from graduation rates to test scores to violence stats, schools across the country are painting a false picture of their performance.

Take Wesley Elementary in Houston. From 1994 to 2003, Wesley won national accolades for teaching low-income students how to read and was featured in an "Oprah" segment on schools that "defy the odds."

It turned out that Wesley wasn't defying the odds at all; the school was cheating. The Dallas Morning News found...severe statistical anomalies in nearly 400 Texas schools.

If schools don't want to cheat on the tests, they get rid of poor students. Oak Ridge High School in Florida boosted its test scores after purging its attendance rolls of 126 low-performing students...

Misrepresenting the dropout rate is another common way to make a school's performance look better than it is. The New York Times described an egregious example. Jerroll Tyler was severely truant from Houston's Sharpstown High School. When he showed up to take a math exam required for graduation, he was told he was no longer enrolled. And he never returned.

Funnily enough, for every case of misbehavior like this that's uncovered, the testing critics rush to blame the tests. They say that all of these cheaters are just hapless teachers/administrators with their backs to the wall, forced to fudge the numbers. I say every instance of this behavior is evidence that real, standardized, objective evidence of student performance is necessary. These sorts of crimes are proof that too many in the education world are willing to resort to fakery to make their students look better, and if it weren't for these tests, we'd be willing to believe them when they claimed the K-12 system was working just fine.

Pressing the right buttons

A clever kid finds a way to use a "clever" calculator:

Texas Instruments is replacing thousands of calculators issued to students in Virginia after a sixth-grader discovered that pressing a certain two keys converts decimals into fractions. That would have given students an unfair advantage on Virginia's standardized tests, which require youngsters to know how to make such conversions with pencil and paper.

At the request of the state education department two years ago, Texas Instruments had disabled the decimal-to-fraction key and left it blank on calculators intended for middle school students.

But in January, Dakota Brown, a 12-year-old at Carver Middle School in suburban Richmond's Chesterfield County, figured out that by pressing two other keys on his state-approved TI-30 Xa SE VA, he could change decimals into fractions anyway...

Calls to the boy's school and his parents to arrange an interview with the youngster were not immediately returned. But Chesterfield County school officials held a low-key ceremony to honor him, and Texas Instruments sent him a graphing calculator, "which he loved," said Lois Williams, the state administrator in charge of middle-school math.

Perhaps Dakota's looking at a possible future in the testing and QA departments at Texas Instruments. After all, no one there caught this.

(Hat tip: Mike Z.)

Leaving a (bad) lasting legacy

Cactus Shadows (where could it be but Arizona?) High School Social Studies Teacher L. Mark Sweeney, recognized for his intellect and his teaching skills, spoke at the 2005 graduation ceremony. By all accounts, Sweeney's speech was excellent.

Too bad it wasn't really his.

Last Wednesday, a CSHS graduate, who did not wish to be identified, stopped by the Sonoran News with a document he said “might be of interest” to the paper. Typed across the top in big, bold type was, “The Dean of Plagiarism Brings You ...” The following line contained the title: “Look at the view ...” The next line, which was crossed out, read, “Anna Quindlen’s Villanova Commencement Address, 1999,” was followed by, “L. Mark Sweeney’s Cactus Shadows High School Graduation Address, 2005.”

Sonoran News Sportswriter Pete Mohr attended the graduation ceremony. He even took notes during Sweeney’s address. And, the notes Mohr took during Sweeney’s address were verbatim from Quindlen’s 1999 Villanova Commencement Address...After asking Mohr if Sweeney’s graduation address was the same as Quindlen’s Villanova address, [the anonymous graduate ] bee-lined down to CSHS to see if he could get a copy of Sweeney’s address from CSHS Principal Gaye Leo...

During his conversation with [Sonoran News Publisher/Editor Don] Sorchych, Sweeney said Leo told him Sonoran News had a copy of the speech. Sweeney explained that his sister found the commencement address a long time ago and sent it to him and he just filed it away. Sweeney said he recently located the file, made a few changes and while he admitted he gave no attribution, Sweeney cited he didn’t know who penned the piece.

A rather cursory Google internet search, using, “Look at the view. You’ll never be disappointed,” yields a plethora of results revealing Quindlen’s name as the author of the 1999 Villanova Commencement Address.

Ooopsie. Isn't it interesting how Google trips up so many sneaky folks these days?

(Hat tip: Michael B.)

Betraying their trust

I think this professor can just write off his student evaluations this year:

A community college professor has been charged with using his students' names and Social Security numbers to obtain department store credit cards. Bradley Neil Slosberg, 49, of Winter Haven, was arrested Friday on charges of criminal use of personal identification and scheming to defraud, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said.

Slosberg and his girlfriend, Deborah Hafner, stole the identities of at least three of the students from his anatomy and physiology class at Polk Community College, sheriff's office spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers said.

I never would have worred about this when I was a student, nor would I ever have thought of it when I was an adjunct. Yet another example of stupidity going hand in hand with poor ethics: if he were going to take this big a risk, I'd say applying for a Visa and immediately buying something big he could sell for some serious cash (or a one-way ticket to France) would have been smarter. Instead, it seems he seriously violated his students' trust in order to obtain a card from the likes of Sears.

We now know where his brain is located

One enterprising would-be surgeon is described in this article as a "rectal specialist." I agree with the description, as anyone that steals high-stakes test items, only to offer them for relatively low dollars ona public forum like eBay, can be safely said to have his head planted firmly in his...

The American Board of Surgery has revised its testing policies after a doctor who failed a certification exam went back to review his test, wrote down the answers to dozens of questions and then put them up for sale on an Internet auction site. The Philadelphia-based board, which has certified tens of thousands of surgeons nationwide, found out last summer that 86 questions used on its 290-question multiple-choice exam were listed on eBay. Questions used on the exam are rotated from a large pool each year...

Craig Edward Amshel, a rectal specialist out of St. Augustine, Fla., failed the 2002 exam. But, as was the practice at the time, he was later allowed to review his test, alone, at the board's offices in downtown Philadelphia for several hours.

"I was able to take notes very quickly and wrote down about 100 questions with the correct answer," Amshel wrote in an e-mail to a person posing, on the board's behalf, as someone preparing to take the 2004 exam. "Believe me, I was quite thrilled when I took the test last year as some questions were verbatim."

Amshel, who passed the 2003 test, has had his board certification revoked. Last fall, the board sued Amshel in federal court in Philadelphia, alleging copyright infringement and civil theft.

Helpful advice for would-be cheaters: Should you decide to steal items, please note that the value of the items includes the entire cost of developing, proofing, assembling, scoring, and using such items, not only on that particular exam but on future exams. For example, stealing a printed item form that cost over half a million dollars to develop will mean that you could be charged with stealing something worth over half a million dollars. Stealing expensive items and selling them for a paltry couple hundred per item bunch thus reflects an astonishing lack of economic sense to go along with the astonishing lack of intelligence and ethics.

Helpful advice for testing companies: Learn from the ABS's mistake and don't allow examinees to review complete test forms in private - not if you ever plan to use those items again.

A royal scandal

More allegations about academic dishonesty and Prince Harry:

Prince Harry was a "weak" student at school whose final work for an art examination was completed by a member of staff, a former teacher at his prestigious private school alleged. Sarah Forsyth, who is claiming unfair dismissal by Eton College, also told an employment tribunal that she wrote virtually all the accompanying text for an art project submitted to external examiners by the prince, now 20.

She considered this to be "unethical and probably constituted to cheating", Forsyth -- a former art teacher at the elite school which charges more than 22,000 pounds a year -- said in a statement on Monday.

When the case began in October last year -- it was later adjourned -- Forsyth alleged she had been ordered by a school administrator to help the young royal pass his art exam.

I've blogged about this before. A scoundrel of a student, or a disgruntled dismissed teacher? Or both?

Too dumb to follow the rules

A University of Delaware student tries the oldie-but-goodie, "Ignorance IS an excuse!" defense:

A University of Delaware student who was suspended after he was caught cheating on a test in a corporate ethics class is suing the school to be reinstated. Frank Tenteromano, a senior, contends in his Chancery Court lawsuit filed last week that he did not know the quiz in the class Seminar in Corporate Governance was, in fact, a quiz.

He claims the class was not told it was a quiz, other students were "collaborating" and that the seminar "by its very nature, encouraged collaboration and discussion," according to the lawsuit.

Neither Tenteromano, who is a resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., according to a campus directory, nor his attorney, Jason Powell, of Wilmington, could be reached for comment Friday. University officials would not comment. In the school's response to the lawsuit, however, attorneys said it was clear the professor was administering a quiz on March 10.

Tentoramano's choices at this point are to be (A) so corrupt that he cheats on ethics exams, or (B) so dumb that he doesn't realize when an exam IS an exam. He's obviously gone with Plan B.

Before the university judicial system reviewed the matter, Tenteromano "boasted that he 'look(ed) forward to seeing (the University) in court' " in an e-mail, the university said...

While the other student involved received a lesser punishment, Tenteromano had three previous violations of the school's code of conduct, including for alcohol, and had been put on "deferred suspension" until graduation, according to court papers.

Verdict: Corrupt and dumb. What a winning combination.

"Everyone's doing it" is not an excuse

I'm trying to figure out exactly what happened here:

Iowa Science test results for a seventh grade class have been invalidated and a teacher has resigned after administrators discovered he quizzed students on materials found in the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. That's according to Tim Hoffman, Adel-DeSoto-Minburn's superintendent.

Hoffman says teacher Gene Zwiefel, who had worked for the district for nearly two decades, resigned last month.

David Frisbie is director of the Iowa City-based Iowa Testing Programs Incorporated, which develops the tests. He said it's not the first time such a situation has happened. He said similar things have occurred at four other Iowa schools. He declined the name the schools.

It seems the teacher gained advance knowledge of the items and was able to coach students on them. If this problem is widespread, that suggests a real security lapse on the part of Iowa Testing Programs. On the other hand, perhaps for this exam, teachers are provided with test materials well ahead of time, and expected to refrain from using the materials in class. This suggests that ITP needs to revise its assumptions about how teachers are using this material.

Leave the cheating principals behind

In Chester, PA, a principal cheats, and the students turn her in:

Jayne Gibbs, a principal and administrator with the for-profit education company Edison Schools, was suspended Thursday after some eighth-graders reported that she had given them the correct answers to questions on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test...

The alleged irregularities on the tests were reported by students at the Edward E. Parry Edison Junior Academy, according to the district's director of assessment, Wayne Emsley. "We were made aware of it by students," Emsley said. "I think that's to their credit. They were uncomfortable with some of the things they were asked to do and they brought it to a staff member's attention."

A bad way of raising scores

Sounds like some teachers at Wai'anae Intermediate School don't have faith in their students:

The Department of Education has halted standardized testing at Wai'anae Intermediate School and launched an investigation after learning that eighth-graders apparently were given some test questions and answers in preparation for the high-stakes exams, schools superintendent Pat Hamamoto said yesterday...

Hamamoto said she knows there has been a lot of talk about how difficult the tests are, as well as the possibility they may be too hard. "We know that when tests get rigid and tests get difficult, these things occur, but that doesn't make it acceptable," she said. "It's unacceptable. Cheating in any form on the HSA is unacceptable."

The 2003-04 NCLB state summary shows that 53% of Hawaiian schools did not meet performance targets; percent proficient on reading and math are at 45% and 23%, respectively. Regardless, cheating is unacceptable, and I'm glad to see the superintendent state this so clearly.

Will test for food

I can't improve upon this NY Daily News headline - "Schooolhouse Crock." The zinger here is how the cheater got caught:

A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday. The illegal stand-in - who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly - not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better than the teacher had previously that the state knew something was wrong, officials said.

This might seem like an indictment of the exam except for the fact that the homeless man, Rubin Leitner, has more college degrees than Brightly, and was already in the process of tutoring him for the exam. Brightly, who has flunked the exam before, apparently figured he'd have a better shot at keeping his $59,000 yearly salary if he forced an overweight white man (Brightly is neither of those) who wasn't even a teacher to take the exam for him.

If the purpose of the exam is to flunk the hopelessly dumb, I say it's been validated here.

Texas cheating rates

A former school superintendent has been indicted for "tampering with government records" in an investigation of misdeeds that include cheating on standardized tests:

The indictment of Charles Matthews on a single count of tampering with government records was announced Tuesday by the Dallas County district attorney's office. On Monday, the Texas education commissioner decided to take full control of the school district after a report that confirmed extensive cheating on the state's standardized tests...

Cedric Davis, former chief of the district's police force, appealed for fairness in the ongoing investigations of the school district's woes. Davis, who is credited as a whistle-blower in the case, asserted that wrongdoings were probably committed "from top to bottom." He noted that clerks reportedly participated in the alleged tampering of attendance records and teachers reportedly fudged test scores...

Matthews was also indicted in October for allegedly destroying records sought by investigators who are investigating the school district's finances. Matthews was subsequently fired.

These preliminary report findings are just stunning:

According to a preliminary state report, two-thirds of educators involved in giving the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills last year were involved in "testing irregularities," The Associated Press reported.

Investigators found that some students who finished the test early were told to correct answers on other students' answer sheets and some educators prepared answer keys for students. In some classrooms, students were told to raise their hands so their answers could be checked before they moved to the next question.

Every time educators participate in cheating like this, several myths come to seem more like fact:

1. Educators cannot handle pressure
2. Students cannot be expected to learn basic skills and take tests on them.
3. All testing is flawed because educators are willing to cheat.

I don't know about you, but those are three myths that I'd love to see shot down. Events like the recent ones in Texas aren't helping with that.

Something's rotten in Norway

Wow, the distribution of scores on this exam ought to be interesting:

A group of student activists opposed to international standard testing launched another effort this week to foil a national mathematics examination. They almost succeeded, with the help of the Internet. The activists got hold of the math exam Monday and put it out on the Internet, thus enabling a sneak peak at what 10th graders were supposed to see for the first time in class on Tuesday. State officials immediately said the test would be administered anyway.

The student activists tried to foil the examination attempt because they want state authorities to postpone the national math exam until next year. They also don't want to see exam results publicized on a school-by-school or township-by-township basis....[they] also...want the content of the exam to reflect Norwegian teaching plans, not those of researchers at the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)...

The test was to be administered to around 60,000 10th graders on Tuesday. At least 10,000 of them are believed to have seen the test by early Tuesday morning.

Time for the Norweigan Education Ministry to up its security. They might not want to use this year's scores for any comparisons purposes, either.

Cheaters at Yale

Caveon's Cheating in the News roundup is back, though I can't seem to find the link to the most recent version. You can also see the whole Caveon crew here at the 2005 Association of Test Publishers conference; Don Sorensen (who alerted me to Caveon's existence) is the gentleman in the blue shirt, front right.

The CITN copy in my inbox contains a link to a Yale Herald article calling for a better policy on academic honesty:

Three students approached their professor after they witnessed a student copying from their tests on multiple occasions. The professor said he didn't want to know the student's name; rather than investigate the situation or hand the case over to the Yale Executive Committee, the professor simply moved subsequent exams to a larger room without addressing the specific allegations of cheating. A senior in the class said that he wasn't offended that a peer was cheating and didn't care that his professor did not punish the student. "All people have the same motive," he said. "The people who cheat and the people who study all just want good grades. Cheating is just a more efficient way of doing it, and no one's against efficiency."

Uh, really? Those who really study aren't actually pursuing knowledge, but just good grades? Cheating is just a "more efficient" way of getting good grades, and isn't shortchanging cheater, other students, and professor in the process? What are these students planning to know, and do, after they graduate college, I wonder? And could a more explicit honesty policy really help someone who is this thoroughly jaded of, and disgusted with, the quest for knowledge?

Or someone who has professors like this one?

Professor of Psychology and Linguistics Paul Bloom, this year's ExComm chair, agreed that faculty should not tempt students, but still feels strongly that cheating is a person's own choice. "You don't want to put [people] in a situation in which a student has to force him or herself not to look at another paper," he said. "On the other hand, you wouldn't take that excuse seriously if it were raised as an excuse for sexual assault, or arson, or anything like that."

Why mention the student having to "force" himself not to cheat if you're not considering it as any excuse? And why, exactly, is it a bad thing to put a student in a situation in which they are expected to, no matter what, keep their eyes to themselves and do their own work? Is that sort of stressful situation too much for Yale undergrads?

For that matter, having to put all personal items aside during an exam, and having to mark a page to show the blue book is new, has no relation to "police state" conditions. The article's author should be embarassed to use that phrase, even in double-quotes.

Losing perspective

N2P reader Jim Parsons has an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle about the recent TAKS cheating scandals:

Suburban districts like Humble are not exempt from problems. If there is one thing we have learned over the past several years, it is that anything can happen anywhere. We are, however, dedicated to reducing the likelihood of cheating in Humble ISD. But all of the procedures, safeguards and after-the-fact analysis we might employ are not the only keys to preventing test cheating, nor are they the most important.

Sometimes it is easy to confuse test scores with learning, just as we often confuse looking good with being good.

The real crime was that she drove to school that day in an Edsel

A grandmother unburdens her conscience:

GYPSUM, Colo. - An high school graduate has confessed to cheating on an English literature test — 47 years ago. Eagle Valley High School Principal Mark Strakbein said he got a one-page, handwritten letter from a 65-year-old grandmother of five who admitted she and a friend stole the answers to a Shakespeare test in the fall of 1957.

Strakbein didn't release the woman's name but said he confirmed she graduated in 1958 from Eagle County High School, which has since been consolidated into Eagle Valley High.

My favorite part is this:

Strakbein said he read the letter aloud to every homeroom class as a lesson in following your conscience.

"You could have heard a pin drop," he said.

It's very sweet, and charitable, of Strakbein to assume that the silence on the part of the teenagers was due to sober reflection. I think it's quite possible, though, that at least some of them were thinking, "She's HOW old? And she still REMEMBERS taking a test on Shakespeare? Man, I don't plan to remember this test NEXT WEEK." And so on.

High-tech cheating

An enterprising young hacker gets nabbed:

A high school student is facing criminal charges for allegedly hooking a device up to a teacher's computer to steal test information to sell to other students, Local 2 reported Tuesday. The student attended Clements High School, 4200 Elkins Dr., in the Fort Bend Independent School District.

The keystroke decoder is widely available at computer stores and on the Internet. It records every keystroke in data that can be downloaded later. It attaches between the computer and the keyboard. "It's surprisingly simple -- to the point our police department is now on alert to other district area police departments to make them aware," Simpson said.

Yet another example of students putting more thought and effort into the act of cheating than of studying, although this one had the twist of making a little profit on the side. Wonder if they're going to go after the students who bought those exams as well?

Friday cheating news

Caveon's biweekly Cheating In the News feature is up, and it features some doozies.

I particularly like this article, in which teachers blamed that dratted Internet for a rise in student cheating:

The Roosevelt High School literature assignment, an analysis of three works by American authors, was composed of awkward sentences full of clumsy grammar — except for the occasional flawless paragraph with complex syntax and striking observation.

The widespread use of the Internet as a research tool has given rise to another phenomenon — widespread cheating among high-school students.

Hmm. Think the fact that high schooler haven't been taught anything past clunky grammar and awkward sentences also might have something to do with it?

Educators say a generation of tech-savvy students, raised on the hacker's mantra that "information wants to be free" and accustomed to downloading copyrighted music, may not realize that copying even a few sentences from the Web and weaving them into their papers, without crediting the original source, constitutes plagiarism and is grounds for suspension from many schools.

Isn't that where the teachers come in? Don't they make this clear to the students in each and every class? And do they really believe all these cheaters who claim that, "Gee, I just didn't know that copying someone else's work was wrong"?

Last year, an editor of the Roosevelt student newspaper touched off a firestorm when she wrote that cheating was a way of life for many high-school students.

Lirman's article was accompanied by a poll of 460 students. Ninety percent said they'd cheated within the past several years; 71 percent admitted to copying material from the Internet to complete assignments.

Yes, the Internet makes it easy. But if the Internet were to disappear tomorrow, somehow, I doubt all the cheating would disappear, too.

Of course, the Internet also makes it easier to catch cheaters, but some teachers believe the solution lies beyond better technology:

Some educators, however, say detection services only inspire more ingenious cheaters. They argue that carefully crafted assignments and more creative teaching is a better deterrent to plagiarism.

"Students often resort to cheating because they can, not because they have to," said Greg Van Belle, an English instructor at Edmonds Community College. Van Belle said assigning an essay on the same topic year after year invites cheating. Better to vary assignments, link classic texts to current events, ask students to work in groups or to write about how a work of literature relates to their own lives, he said.

Keeping an eagle eye on Texas schools

Follow-up to last week's cheating hullabaloo in Texas:

The state education agency is launching an effort to catch cheating on standardized tests, officials announced Monday. Officials will hire an outside expert to review security measures and build a tracking system to monitor test scoring irregularities that could signal cheating...

TEA's announcement breaks with a previous policy of trusting districts to police themselves. TEA officials had said they investigated cheating allegations only when a district requested it or when they received credible eyewitness evidence of cheating.

The Dallas Morning News, not surprisingly, has more:

Dr. Neeley said the agency had not yet decided how exactly it would analyze test scores to search for cheaters. The News methodology examined the average scale scores of students in each grade at every school. TEA officials have access to more detailed data on individual students, which could allow for more precise detecting of unusual gains.

Search the DMN site for a wealth of related articles, including more detailed coverage of suspicious scores at "the most celebrated elementary school in Texas:"

...a Dallas Morning News investigation has found strong evidence that at least some of the success at Wesley and two affiliated schools come from cheating.

But a year later, the scores of those same students came crashing down. When they were sixth-graders at M.C. Williams Middle School, they finished in the bottom 10 percent of the state in both reading and math.

Emphasis mine. Sheesh. It's hard to understand why it took the district this long to consider a tracking system and external review.

Big trouble in big Texas

Quite a bombshell story shaping up in Houston this week:

A Houston teacher's union official says school district officials ignored a middle school teacher who tried to report cheating on standardized tests last spring. The Houston Federation of Teachers says the teacher told union representatives last year that a school administrator gave her advance copies of the 2004 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

HISD spokesman Terry Abbott declined to comment.

So what's going on here? It seems that teachers in Houston schools, as is their custom, used last year's exam sheets to prep for this year's exams - which is perfectly kosher on exams that don't re-use items. Only, somehow, in certain schools, what got used for this year's prep was this year's exam, and all the hullaballoo has to do with WHO got ahold of those test forms ahead of time. Teachers aren't too happy that the finger of suspicion is now pointed their way:

There are now 23 schools in the Houston School District suspected of having problems with test scores. Those problems may be tied to cheating on the statewide TAKS test...

The union says it also received complaints last year by minimum wage office clerks, claiming principals were asking them to change grades.

SOMEBODY's been very bad here. Be interesting to see how that press conference on Monday turns out.

When cheating costs an arm and a leg

From Caveon's biweekly Cheating In the News roundup, we have a tale of creepily horrific over-reactions to cheating:

Separatists in India's north-eastern state of Manipur have shot six male teachers in the leg for allegedly helping students cheat in exams. Two women teachers were beaten with sticks for the same offence, the rebels of the Kanglei Yana Kan Lup group said.

The rebels said the teachers took up to 5,000 rupees ($110) for helping students cheat and warned of further punishment if the cheating continued.

But then there's this Nebraskan, who doesn't have a problem with cheating at all:

Conor Schultze cheats. And, if asked, he’ll say he doesn’t mind doing it. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln freshman advertising major said he hasn’t been caught cheating, and he thinks professors don’t take cheating seriously.

“When I cheat for tests, I write the answers on my leg or my arm,” he said. “If I cheat, it’s in classes that I don’t care about.”

Ironic, isn't it, that the body part he's using to help him cheat is the same one that's getting shot off of cheaters in India? Surely, there's got to be a happy medium in here somewhere

Rolling back the cost of cheating

From Devoted Reader Ashley comes this tale of cheating with style - and lots and lot of of Old Money (in the US, having rich grandparents qualifies for that):

When they named a University of Missouri sports arena after their daughter, billionaire Wal-Mart heirs Nancy and Bill Laurie pronounced themselves "very proud parents." But this week, they found themselves stripping Paige's name from the building - after allegations that she paid a roommate $20,000 to do most of her coursework at the University of Southern California.

Elizabeth Paige Laurie, 22, graduated from USC this year. But her first-semester roommate, Elena Martinez, said Paige hired her to write her papers, prepare her oral reports and even exchange e-mail with her professors in nearly every class she took for four years.

Nearly every class? Good Lord. I can understand students who buckle to the pressures of one tough professor, but if you're not going to do anything the entire four years, why go to school?

Meanwhile, USC has opened an investigation into the alleged cheating. In 25 years in academia, vice president for student affairs Michael Jackson said, "I've never heard of possible cheating of this magnitude."

"I rarely got a bad grade, but if I did, she'd say 'This was horrible.' She was pretty picky," Martinez said. "She was a very demanding, expect-the-best boss." She said she collected about $20,000 over four years.

Only $5K a year for someone who's broke and doing all your schoolwork - and forced to adhere to high standards, to boot? The drive to get the most product for the least amount of money must run in the Wal-Mart heir's veins.

Trouble in Texas

Sounds like this school is "troubled" in more ways than one:

A student at the troubled Wilmer-Hutchins school district says his teacher helped him with answers on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills standardized test last year.

"The teacher would walk around the class during the test and be like, 'Hey, that's wrong,"' James Wright, now a 12-year-old sixth-grader at Kennedy-Curry Middle School, told The Dallas Morning News for its Sunday editions. "You'd go through the answers and you'd say, 'Is this the right one?' They'd say 'nope.' And you'd say, 'Is this the right one?' And they'd say 'nope' until you got the right one. Then they'd say 'Yeah' and nod their head."

Sounds like someone needs to say to this teacher, "Hey, that's wrong."

An analysis by the newspaper first raised suspicions that cheating took place on the TAKS tests in the district. It found that despite a history of poor academic performance, one elementary school in the district posted the state's highest scores on the third grade reading TAKS test last year.

The district has been investigated in recent months by the Texas Rangers, two grand juries, the FBI and others on alleged misappropriation of funds and other accusations.

The Texas Rangers got involved? Whooo, that's heavy. And good for the newspaper for poking around in the data.

Damm said he has told district principals that if any of them knowingly allowed cheating at their schools, they will treated as if they did the cheating themselves. Falsifying testing documents is a third-degree felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison...

"When the test started, some people didn't know the answers, so they'd raise their hand and the teacher would come up to them. The teacher read the question and then gave us the answer," said Guyler Easter, who attended Alta Mesa in the fifth grade and is now a seventh-grader at Kennedy-Curry Middle in Wilmer-Hutchins.

If it's that widespread, maybe it is a job for the good guys in the white hats.

I'm cheating, I know, but I'm doing so well!

The Battalion newspaper from Texas A&M profiles a brainless wonder:

A student walks into her crammed classroom. She finds the perfect seat - one against a wall. The teacher has the seating arrangement so that tests given to the students differentiate from Form A to Form B, each form with different questions and answers. The student makes sure her seat sits at exactly an angle which allows her to see a test in front of her that is identical to hers. Every once in a while, she glances to her front neighbor's test to compare her answers, calculating her peeks to coincide with when the teacher looks away.

"I knew that in high school, if I hadn't cheated, I wouldn't have done really well on my daily assignments," she said. "I didn't cheat on exams. Here, there
aren't any daily grades, so it's more important to do well on exams."

And what about when you graduate and enter the real world, which produces "tests" for which no cheating is possible? Will you expend your energy trying to get around every rule? Will you try to set up every situation so that you can check your "answers?" Will you eventually become insightful enough to wonder why you didn't bother to learn as much as you could in school, or why you didn't choose a major that inspired you so much that you preferred learning to cheating?

Please, Ms. "Aggie with an Alibi". Do the professional world a favor and list this article on your resume when you graduate. If just one company is spared from hiring such a selfish and deluded twit, I'll be pleased.

Cheating news roundup

Caveon's biweekly Cheating In The News collection includes this description of over-achieving cheaters:

High-tech schemes to achieve undeserved academic success can sometimes be quite intricate. One case involved two senior undergraduates at a major East Coast university. While one was taking the nationwide Graduate Record Examination, he used a wireless transmitter to send images of the test to his accomplice waiting in a van. The accomplice then ascertained the answers to the test questions, sending them back to the exam taker via walkie-talkies. The two young men supposedly invested $12,000 in equipment to implement their plan; they were arrested on charges of burglary and unlawful duplication of computer material.

Raise your hand if you think it would have been a lot easier to just study for the dang test than to go to this much effort. Examples like this give lie to the notion that all cheating is based on laziness. Some examinees expend so much effort in cheating that it can only be from the ego-boosting high that comes from defying authority. A natural outgrowth of the "you're perfect just as you are" false self-esteem lessons taught in our schools, I'd say.

Columnist Trevor Bothwell of The Fence, on the other, keeps the blame on the schools, but insists that the "cooperative learning" lessons are the cause:

For years now public schools have championed the merits of “cooperative learning,” where students are grouped into mini-communes of four or five. The idea here is to encourage cooperation between peers, where the brighter students in the group are expected to facilitate the learning of those less academically adroit.

Aside from the sheer foolishness of expecting any individual student to be responsible for the learning of anyone but himself, “cooperative” methods of learning discourage independent thinking in addition to encouraging misbehavior and cheating. Indeed, these instructional methods are invented by the very same teachers who believe grading papers with red ink is “pretty frightening” for kids, at least according to Sharon Carlson, a health and physical education teacher at JFK Middle School in Northampton, Mass.

From the New York Post comes a tale of today's confused teenagers:

A national survey of 24,763 high-schoolers found 62 percent of them admitted cheating on a school test in the past 12 months, 27 percent stole something from a store during that period, and 40 percent admit they "sometimes lie to save money." In a telling twist, nearly a third didn't even tell the truth on the integrity survey — 29 percent of the students polled by the Josephson Institute of Ethics 'fessed up to fibbing on one or two of the more than 60 questions.

But, despite owning up to dishonest behavior, a whopping 98 percent of the students believe "honesty and trust are essential in personal relationships" — and 83 percent said at least half their acquaintances would put their name on a list of "the most ethical people they know."

Sad to say, they might be the most ethical people they know. Their friends could certainly be worse. The part about honesty in personal relationships is sad on several levels. My guess is what these kids consider inter-relationship "honesty" is being blunt, tactless, and telling the other person exactly what you think of them - which is NOT necessarily the key to a successful relationship. The kinder world of moral individuals who practice social hypocrisy to keep the peace (the "little white lies" that make life easier) has been replaced by a world in which cheating is fine, and so is insulting people to their faces.

Finally, at UT-Arlington, a panel on academic honesty brings out some interesting statements:

Cheaters prosper, Engineering Senator, Nicolas Cornor said. “Martha Stewart, Haliburton, Enron and Microsoft are accurate representations that honesty in the public doesn’t get you anywhere,” the aerospace engineering sophomore said.

Isn't Martha unhappily divorced and in jail right now? Sure, she's still rich, but I'm not sure I'd want to be in her shoes.

Patricia Nickel, testing assessment services coordinator, rebutted by saying students have a responsibility to hold up the university’s reputation even after they leave. “If you cheated your way through school and you don’t really know the material, you are hurting the university,” Nickel said. “These people go out into the work force and represent UTA. If they look bad, we look bad.”

Patricia Nickel, coordinator for testing assessment services, rebutted by saying if people can not turn off their cell phones for an hour lecture, then they should really ask themselves what they are doing here.

I like this Nickel gal.

Well, he can't plead a "disadvanted" upbringing

The royals are not immune to the cheating bug, it appears:

Prince Harry was secretly taped by his Eton teacher to prove her claims that he was an exam cheat, a tribunal heard today. The hearing listened to the recording of the prince saying he had only done a "tiny, tiny" bit of the coursework for his art A-level.

The tribunal heard that shortly after making the tape Miss Forsyth justified her actions in a letter saying "no one was prepared to listen to my complaint".

If I follow the story correctly, Miss Forsyth is claiming that in order to keep her job, she was forced to prepare material that would be submitted as part of Prince Harry's A-level coursework. If true, this is appalling, but then the entire scenario seems appalling, with mud being flung in every direction.

Cheating news roundup

Caveon's biweekly Cheating in the News page is up. If you work for any sort of testing agency or department and would like to contribute to a survey about test security needs, here's your chance to do so.

Included in Caveon's roundup is a description of an academic integrity pledge that students at Walter Johnson High School (Bethesda, MD) were asked to sign:

According to Assistant Principal Chris Merrill, the policy changes were enacted this year because the committee in charge of school improvement, as well as a group of teachers, realized that it was time to establish a way of both consistently defining plagiarism in addition to regulating actions taken against students caught cheating and plagiarizing.

Now, because students have signed the code, there is no question about whether what they have done is something they should be persecuted for or not.

This got me wondering about the role that honor codes play in the academic environment. Do educators think they work? How big a part do they play in student behavior? And are such codes ever controversial?

At McKinley High School in Hawaii, for example, an honor code created in 1927 mentions God, which is no longer acceptable:

A Hawaii high school will have to lose its controversial code that mentions the name "God." Tuesday the State settled with a student who sued the McKinley High School in a case dealing with separation of Church and State. McKinley is Oahu's oldest public high school and this code has been a part of the school since 1927. But this settlement puts an end to this part of McKinley High School's history.

In the settlement to a lawsuit, McKinley agreed to remove the code from all school materials - save one plaque with the original code. Under the terms of this settlement, the plaque in the McKinley administration building will be allowed to stay. But the school will not allowed to produce any other reproductions of the code of honor.

As far as influence goes, this article suggests that it's not so much what's written in the code as how the adults in students' lives follow it:

''Kids lie more now than I've ever known them to,'' says Charles Sawyer, president of the Itsy Bitsy People Palace, a private school on Chicago's South Side.

''The 40 percent of kids who aren't cheating look around and say, 'Everyone's cheating.' If enough people do it, then kids don't think it's wrong,'' says Michael Josephson, founder and president of the Josephson Institute. He teaches kids that ''no matter how many people do it, it's still wrong.''

At least one study has been done to show that colleges with honor codes have fewer instances of cheating, although the study is from 1998:

[Rutgers University Professor Donald] noted that more than one out of four students in college have cheated more than once. However, in every category, schools with honor codes recorded significantly less cheating than those institutions that do not have codes...

He noted that several institutional factors influence cheating. The largest influence on cheating is that cheating is considered a campus norm...Other institutional factors that influence whether students cheat include that the school has no honor code, penalties for cheating are not severe and students have little chance of being caught. The final influence is that faculty understanding and support of academic integrity policies is low. "Students noted [in the surveys] that some faculty members see cheating, and do nothing about it," he said.

Finally, Miami (FL) Palmetto Senior High recently drafted a pragmatic honor code:

The honor code committee also aims to identify what constitutes academic misconduct and prevent students from gaining an unfair advantage over other students through cheating.

"We don't include homework because we would have 50 people in our conference room everyday," Shosfy said. "We have to start with the big things and work our way down. Right now it would be impossible to enforce it. We acknowledge the fact that cheating on homework is wrong, but aren't punishing for it in the near future."

Makes sense. Hopefully, students will learn that for themselves that while cheating on tests is wrong, regularly cheating on homework is crazy, because you'll never learn anything that way.

Strange things are afoot in Nevada

Education Week's latest report says cheating may be up by as much as 50% in the Silver State:

Testing irregularities in Nevada’s public schools, including incidents involving student cheating and teacher misconduct, increased by more than 50 percent in 2003-04 from the previous school year, according to an annual report. The report, which was mandated by the legislature in 2001, found 24 incidents of student cheating and 10 incidents that involved the improper disclosure of testing materials to students by teachers in the past school year.

However, out of 121 testing irregularities listed, half were "the result of improper test administration." School officials insist that NCLB is so confusing that such irregularities are unavoidable.

Not surprisingly, Monty Neill of Fairtest, a notoriously anti-testing organization, insists that cheaters aren't the problem - tests are:

Monty Neill, the executive director of the National Association for Fair & Open Testing, a Cambridge, Mass.-based watchdog group, said that incidents of cheating nationwide are relatively few. But the 2½-year- old federal law has greatly raised the stakes for schools, he said...The federal law, in his view, has helped foster a kind of testing mania, and cheating obscures what he argues is the real problem: the improper use of tests.

Proctors can be expensive, and studies have shown that test administrators who are unfamiliar to students can make some test-takers uncomfortable. As a result, the students may perform poorly on the tests.

To which I can only say - get real. You can't convince me that NCLB is the only instance of classroom security to which today's students have ever been subjected. Yet we're supposed to believe that proctors - which needn't be highly-educated individuals - are out the price range for most schools, and highly intimidating across the board to boot?

Classic anti-testing arguments like the ones above seem to rest on two assumptions:

1. Teachers simply can't be expected to learn how to give secure exams in the classroom.

2. Educators cannot be expected to handle high standards without being willing to help students cheat on exams.

That is the underlying concept here, right? I'm surprised Education Week seems unwilling to point out to readers that, no matter where the standards are set, some educators would be willing to help kids cheat; this is no excuse for good educators doing so when higher standards apply.

What's more, Monty even puts the kibosh on giving teachers better instruction on how to administer tests:

Training teachers to administer tests, although a good means of prevention, also involves a trade-off, said Mr. Neill, because it can take time away from more educationally beneficial activities such as professional development.

Something tells me that Monty doesn't really want a world in which teachers understand the tests they're giving, and know how to give them properly, does he? It would remove his entire basis for explaining away cheating by insisting that we just can't expect these poor, poor educators to be able to follow the rules.

Luckily, Nevada doesn't seem to be listening to him:

Nevada education officials are taking some steps to reduce testing irregularities. The state department of education has refined its annual training sessions on test administration, solicited feedback from districts about unclear instructions and test-administration guidelines, and made testing guidelines available online, by mail, and at training sessions.

The department has also requested a full-time training officer to help oversee the testing-irregularities caseload, which is expected to increase when the state begins administering mathematics and reading tests that will be phased in this year.

Good. It's necessary. Interestingly, Nevada seems to keep close tabs on its teachers in other ways as well:

In addition to law enforcement records, the Nevada Department of Education also relies on a database maintained by the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification...The database collects records of licenses, suspensions and revocations from all 50 states, U.S. territories, British Columbia, New Zealand and several Canadian provinces, according to the organization's Web site.

"We used to just ask them if their license had ever been suspended or revoked somewhere else and they could honestly answer 'no,"' [State Superintendent Kevin] Rheault said. "Now we have grounds to take action ourselves if we find out down the line that someone lied on their application."

Vibrating socks and "adjusted" SAT scores

Caveon's biweekly Cheating In The News newsletter is up. One link explains why everyone drives badly in France and why the unemployment rate is so high - because every one is spending time and money on James Bond-ian schemes to get around the driver's license exam. I bet the new Texas A&M Aggie Honor System Council would have those vibrating socks confiscated in a heartbeat.

And speaking of cheating, some school do it too; University of South Florida officials have resigned after hiding low test scores of incoming freshmen.

Two top University of South Florida admissions officials resigned after a university investigation showed they ordered below-average entrance exam scores by USF freshmen dropped from reports filed with the state. One of the officials involved said Thursday that USF was following the lead of other state universities and that top school administrators knew about the adjustments.

University spokeswoman Michelle Carlyon said school officials were looking into whether the deletions inflated USF's average test scores and, if so, by how much.

One of those officials insists that USF did nothing wrong, or even out of the ordinary:

Until summer 2003, if a student admitted to USF took the SAT or the ACT more than once, the school reported to state education officials the score received on each sitting, [Dewey Holleman, 41, director of undergraduate admissions]
said. In summer 2003, admissions officials learned other state universities weren't playing by the same rules, Holleman said. Some reported the highest scores to the state and excluded the lower ones, he said.

Admissions officials weren't trying to fool the state, because the state education department already receives the results of all the standardized tests Florida high school students take, he said.

I doubt that last point gets USF off the hook; the matter of whether the state has the scores doesn't affect whether, or how, USF was supposed to report them.

Cheating news roundup

Caveon's weekly roundup of cheating news contains this delicious story on something that drives me absolutely NUTS on almost any online forum or journal I join - the tendency for the younger set to be, er, "creative" with spelling and abbreviations:

A recent feature story noted that many teachers fear new technology is leading to rampant academic dishonesty.

That will just lead to report cards that make your parents go, like, :-(

Is text messaging a gateway to illiteracy in the same fashion that marijuana is a gateway to harder drugs? Maybe. Once you get addicted to writing "u r gr8!", it's hard to go back...

And at UA, students who aren't busy perfecting tortilla tosses are instead perfecting ways to cheat in business classes:

According to the Code of Academic Integrity Summary Report, released by the Dean of Students Office, 68 cases of academic violations by students enrolled in the Eller College of Management were reported during the 2003-2004 academic year. Thirty-three of those cases were initiated by Eller College faculty members. This is a dramatic increase from the previous academic year.

While most officials would be upset to see a rise in reporting of cases of academic dishonesty from their college, Paul Melendez, the Eller College undergraduate programs adviser, says he thinks this is evidence that "E-tegrity" initiative is working.

Well, that's one way to put a positive spin on things.

In other cheating news, I'm sure absolutely no one will be surprised to hear that Paris Hilton, who is a bad example of humanity in just about every sense of the word, cheated her way through school:

During an appearance on MTV show Total Request Live, the socialite confessed she cheated on all her exams when she was in high school, a course of action she now disapproves of.

She said, "I was really bad in high school. I cheated on every test, which is really bad kids, because then you don't learn anything. I'm really mad that I cheated and didn't do my homework because now I don't know some of that stuff, so study."

Words of wisdom from the...not-so-wise, I suppose.

And more cheaters whom you really, really don't want to cheat:

Harrisburg city officials said they got a tip last week some [police] cadets may have had access to test questions before taking exams. The city contacted HACC where 49 cadets are enrolled in the 16-week training course.

The city is already conducting its own investigation.

To paraphrase Paris - police cadets, cheating is "really bad, kids, because then you don't learn anything." Like, say, the issue of Miranda rights, and which direction to point the gun?

Cheaters with blood on their hands (literally)

Becuase I forgot to post last week's Cheating in the News roundup from Caveon, here it is. Apparently, there's a computer virus that can steal test items, though I'll believe that only after Snopes verifies it. Cheating has gotten so bad, though, that even people who you really, really don't want to be faking their knowledge are starting to do so. I don't know which is worse - the knowledge that you can fake your way through an EMT exam, or the idea that some people are happy to do so.

Oh, and on a related topic, blogger CD of Ipse Dixit has discovered that a nine-year-old essay of his on Jane Eyre is for sale online! Now we can all own a little piece of CD, and if our professors aren't too sharp, we can pass it off as our own.

Cheating news roundup

Since I didn't get the chance to post Caveon Security's Cheating Roundup from the 12th, here you go. Everything from cheating Kiwis to those who insist that camera phones are better "regulated" than banned outright, because we all know kids never cheat with those things:

The cheating scenario is a stretch from the get-go. Cellphones used that way would be too conspicuous in any classroom where the teacher is paying even minimal attention. Besides, the camera function isn't a key to that kind of cheating. Current phone screens display text, and — though it would take a little more stealth — a cheater could message the questions.

Rather than outright cheating, it seems more likely that students might snap a quick photo of the FCAT tests and perhaps post the questions on the Web. I'm not sure that having a ban makes that kind of espionage less likely. In fact, I'll bet it happens soon, if for no other reason than to protest Gov. Bush's refusal to make FCAT tests from previous years public.

So, kids don't cheat with camera-phones, except when they're engaged in this honorable form of civil protest, is that it?

And here's another instance of test score cancellations due to "tampering" (love those euphemisms!):

Eighth-graders who recently graduated from Sunset Ridge School won't be able to compare their math skills to other Illinois students when the state reports standardized test scores this fall. After investigating an incident of test tampering at the Northfield school in April, the Illinois State Board of Education has said it will withhold the tainted math portion of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test for the 80 students believed to have been affected...

Students alerted Bailis to the changes during third period on their second day of math testing. Administrators discovered while questioning students and faculty that changes had also been made to the tests from the second day's first-period eighth-grade math class. When administrators asked Bailis what he was doing during second period, when changes were likely made, Bailis said he was at a grocery store buying Jolly Ranchers candy, according to an 18-page internal investigation released by the district last week. Administrators could not verify Bailis's claim.

That's an...interesting alibi. Note to Bailis: Years of watching true crime shows has taught me that the police tend to be suspicious of anyone who can instantly recall, down to the tiniest detail, exactly what they were doing at a time when a crime occurred. Innocent people tend to forget what they were doing and have to check their calendars; guilty people instantly offer up a detailed alibi. The "Jolly Ranchers" part cinches it for me.

Clueless cheaters

More updates from the War on Cheating. Poor Blair Hornstine - her name doesn't come up just in articles about litigation-happy students, but also in articles about plagiarists:

Eric Wellington, dean of business and computer information systems at Delaware County Community College in Marple, agrees that plagiarism has long been a plague of the academic community. "I don’t think it is anything new. I think it’s easier to do it because of technology. It’s easy to go to a Web site and copy and paste," said Wellington.

In a similar survey in 2001, 10 percent of students or 28 percent less than in 2003, said they engaged in "cut-and-paste" plagiarism using the Internet. The 2003 survey also showed that 44 percent of the students considered such plagiarism trivial or not cheating at all.

Emphasis mine. I'm glad the universities are doing all they can, but if these kids are reaching college age without ever learning that plagiarism is wrong, something is wrong with the K-12 system, too. Hey, maybe everyone should have to write a book in fourth grade. Once they see the hard work that goes into writing, and once they realize how mad they'd be if someone stole their words, perhaps they'll be less likely to pilfer the works of others.

Cheating around the world

The Cheating News roundup from Caveon this week includes a rather surprising example of a test administration with no cheating observed:

The Education and Training Ministry [of Vietnam] took measures to prevent cheating among the 750,000 twelfth graders who began taking their three-day final exams on Wednesday.

Any supervisors caught violating exam regulations would be seriously punished, said Le Thi Thanh Xuan, deputy chief inspector on education of the ministry.

Oookay, so maybe it's not surprising that no one cheated. Deputy chief inspector Le Thi Thanh Xuan doesn't sound like he's joking around. Gee, why can't he be more relaxed about this whole cheating phenomenon? You know, like the enlightened professors in American who gladly admit that their students are "no saints"?

When Bill was unsure of the answer to a question in a finance exam last year, he sent a text message on his cell phone to a friend who was also taking the test. The friend sent him the correct answer. When Lisa wasn't sure she could remember mathematical formulas for an accounting exam, she stored them in a calculator with its own memory, and then used them to help complete the test.

"We like to think our students are more committed than most, but they are not saints, either,'' said Charles Strain, the school's associate vice president for academic affairs.

Oh, hey, as long as they're committed, then it's okay, right? I mean, God forbid you should try to take Bill's cell phone away from him during an exam, or insist that would-be accountants like Lisa actually memorize formulas. God forbid you should expect students to be smart enough to understand that cheating is still cheating when you use new technology:

Cheating these days comes with an added twist -- new technology, which in some cases makes it so easy that students don't even believe what they are doing is wrong. From cutting and pasting text from a Web site into a term paper to using cell phones or personal data assistants equipped with wireless Internet access to search for answers while taking a test, technology is becoming a partner in dishonesty.

Emphasis mine, because I'm not buyin' it. Nope, no sale here. You cannot convince me that just because a student can cut and paste off the Internet, as opposed to out of an encyclopedia, that student doesn't realize that it's cheating. You cannot convince me that a student, who knows that asking their friend for answers during an exam is wrong, somehow will believe that it isn't wrong if they use a cell phone to do so.

I call horse puckey on this one. The powers that be have merely pulled the wool over their own eyes, and allowed themselves to believe that students are somehow confused by all this new technology, when the rest of us all realize that students are becoming experts at using these new gadgets to cheat.

And I think Le Thi Thanh Xuan would agree with us.

But back to the poor, confused American students:

And because of increased competition to get into top colleges and graduate schools, students say they are under more pressure than ever to get good grades, leading them to cheat more.

I think I accidentally stepped on, and crushed, the world's smallest violin this morning, so the sad, sad song to accompany this tale of dishonest, over-competitive woe will have to wait until I locate the world's smallest banjo. Then you can all join me in a moving bluegrass song entitled, "I Got Them Non-Ivy-League Blues."

And speaking of bluegrass, here's one Kentuckian who isn't buying the notion that we have to give in and allow these poor, confused, pressured students to cheat whenever they want:

The Newsweek headline says resume lies are on the rise, and it details harrowing stories about the huge increase in "fibbing" on resumes. The magazine cited a-Korn/Ferry online survey that said 44.7 percent of respondents think resume fraud among executives is increasing.

That means the cheaters win and get rewarded. That has to change. Perhaps we don't have the wherewithal to turn people in to the authorities, but each of us should be able to find the courage to tell cheaters we disapprove of their behavior...

I think we should find the wherewithal to do at least that much. If not, we really can't say much about the students for whom high grades without subject mastery are the ultimate goals.

A weak link in the testing process

Columnist Dan Bernstein has some harsh words for teachers who cheat on tests (free sub required):

Suppose you're a student at Riverside's Sierra Middle School, and you've wrapped up another round of state tests and it comes out that one of your teachers changed the answers on 78 of those exams. What do you think of them apples?

So it's bad enough when one bad apple (Mr. Akinremi, who resigned) takes it upon himself to cheat the system. But when 37 of the bad apple's co-workers sign a petition, begging the powers to keep the cheater on the job, well that does bring on the chuckles.

As Dan rightly points out, a teacher who's willing to change test answers to help students also has the freedom to change answers to hurt students. And that should make students feel very insecure, indeed.

It's hard to cheat with a slide rule

THIS cheating study ought to ruffle some feathers:

Thirty-eight percent of undergraduate students surveyed last year said they had engaged in "cut-and-paste" plagiarism from the Internet in the previous year, according to a national study led by expert Donald McCabe of Rutgers University in New Jersey. That was up from 10 percent in a 2001 study.

Business students across campuses generally self-reported some of the highest levels of cheating...High levels of cheating also were reported by those majoring in education, communication and journalism, while the lowest levels were reported by science majors.

That's not surprising. I don't say that because I think people in education and journalism are necessarily more stupid or lazy (although I'm sure one could argue that students in these courses might be given inadequate instruction on how to do proper research and exam preparation). I say that because science and math courses are cumulative in a way that journalism and education course are not. What's the point of cheating on a math exam when the next exam will require you to have mastered all the previous concepts? What's the point in copying down your roommate's chemistry homework when your inability to balance equations will quickly become evident in other areas?

In classes where the grades are based on papers or oral reports on non-cumulative topics, downloading an essay from the Internet would be a useful way of cheating. But in science courses, you learn the equations or you get the heck out. Anyone who tries bending these rules won't last long.

More cheating links from Caveon's Cheating in the News update.

When those giving the exams don't quite understand the rules

Now, here's a classic headline about testing misbehavior: "Cheating or misunderstandings?"

Nine Arizona school districts have invalidated portions of their spring standardized test scores because teachers gave students extra time to complete parts of the test or read sections of the test to students.

In another case, state education officials are trying to salvage test scores of hundreds of students in Phoenix's Creighton Elementary, Gilbert Unified and Yuma Elementary districts, where teachers allowed students to take two, even three days, to finish essays for the most recent AIMS test. Directions clearly state that the essay must be written in one sitting. The state has asked the three districts to pay for a study to determine if the extra days gave students an unfair advantage.

I would be very surprised if it didn't, although if the kids had truly poor writing skills, extra time might not have helped them that much (but they certainly could have used their nights to do some revising and research, if needed). How this could possibly be a misunderstanding, though, I can't imagine, despite the testing coordinator's insistence that this mistake would have been very easy to make.

Granted, it's not outright deception, as in the case of one hapless principal:

The highest-profile case involved Maureen Booth, who was principal at Sequoya Elementary School in the Scottsdale district. District officials claimed Booth changed Stanford 9 scores so her teachers could receive incentive pay. Booth denied any wrongdoing, and the district dropped the allegations in December in exchange for her resignation. The state's case against her remains open.

Regardless, when "misunderstandings" are this widespread (and isn't it interesting that such misunderstandings almost always happen in a way that can only benefit the student), something is wrong.

Alice Finn Gartell is the attorney for the Arizona Education Association, which represents about half of Arizona's 46,000 teachers. Gartell said cheating allegations fall into three categories: intentional cheating; sloppy or accidental cheating, such as misunderstanding directions; and teachers who think it's acceptable to help a little, such as pointing to a question and asking a student, "Have you checked on these numbers?"

"It is breaking the procedures in such a way that students score better and thus it compromises the validity of the test," said Berliner, former dean of ASU's College of Education.

Exactly. This is why psychometricians like myself get so bent out of shape about even small instances of cheating. We spend a lot of time fighting the notion that such tests are by definition invalid; when teachers intentionally or carelessly invalidate tests through this kind of behavior, no one wins. Because there is such a strong emphasis on testing these days, teachers should recieve a thorough training that doesn't leave wiggle room. If anything, I think the situation is not "high-stakes" enough - at least, not enough to convince teachers that these kinds of "misunderstandings" are unacceptable.

Cheating news roundup - 7/1 and 7/9

I didn't get a chance to post last week's Cheating News roundup from Caveon, so here you go. The two items that most interested me were the exam theft in the UK and the appalling widespread nature of cheating in California (Caveon's link is no longer active but I found one that was).

In the UK, parents and students are appalled and disgusted with the cheaters, as well as a lapse in security that allowed secure test items to leak out. But in California, there's no real question about where the security leaks are, and no quotes from outraged parents. Just a mention of one confused teacher who thought it was, you know, perfectly okay to let kids revise their essays before including them on the exams.

Don also links to a discussion found on an online bulletin board in which some kid babbles on at length about his oh-so-honorable "Five Ideals of Cheating." Now, I follow a lot of true crime news, and something about his guidelines rang a bell, but I couldn't figure out just what it reminded me of.

Then I realized that these five "ideals" - never tell anything to the authorities, never brag, use precaution, change your MO, keep doing it until your goals are achieved - are also the same five ideals that contract and serial killers use to avoid detection from the law. And I have about as much respect for this poster (for someone who insists, "Don't brag!", he sure is showing off here) as I would for any other criminal. I consider his list a pathetic attempt to reassure himself, and his readers, that these actions are somehow justified if you're clever enough in going about them.

(Cheating News from 7/9 will be added when Caveon's page is updated.)

Weekly Caveon cheating roundup

Don Sorensen's weekly cheating new round-up is available here. He very graciously links to N2P - thanks!

I just have to comment on a couple of the stories he uncovered.

In Singapore, they take test security very seriously, it seems. Jail sentences for leaking test items are rare here in the US, but anyone who might be thinking of sneaking away with a test booklet or two should know that those crimes are often vigorously prosecuted as theft (of copyrighted material). The "amount" that is declared stolen is often calculated as the cost of development of every now-exposed and unusable item, and this value can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This FCAT cheating story broke when I was on vacation. The sticking point seems to be, as on the SAT, identical patterns of wrong answers. Students are being allowed retakes in June.

Finally, there are the cellphone cheaters. I've posted about this before. There's no reason on earth to allow students to have cellphones in class during exams, and it's hard to believe that teachers are paying so little attention that students have been able to cheat in this fashion. (Update: Devoted Reader Chris C points out that some schools haven't been ignoring the problem at all, and are in fact actively combating it.)

Thanks to Don for all these links. I plan to make my commentary on his weekly cheating roundup a regular feature here on N2P.

Cheaters are big news

It seems one of my Devoted Readers is in the business of catching cheaters. Don Sorensen emailed me to let me know that he is a founder in a new company, Caveon Test Security. A bi-weekly newsletter called "Cheating in the News" is available to those in the testing and education industries. Archives may be found here. The June 4th archive alone contains seven articles, a few of which I might have missed, with my searches because they focus on certification exams. Dan mentioned that he'd like to point some readers my way, so I thought I'd do the same. Click here to read everything in my archive that's in the "Cheaters" category (although you'll need to enter the keyword "cheat" in my search engine to get the stuff that was written before May of 03).

I thought this story from Dan's June 4th archives was particularly compelling. It's about a student, Alexis Martin, who blew off her first SAT and then aced the second one, only to have ETS accuse her of cheating.

Read the whole thing. It seems to be, at first, a typical tearjerking tale about an innocent student vs. evil ETS, but then a real psychometrician got involved. He didn't take sides, but instead analyzed the data, and concluded (tactfully) that there is solid evidence to suggest that the "innocent" student may not be. An equally-tactful opposition to ETS's policies, though, is provided by a (named) member of the test prep community; nice to see that the typical "critics say" method wasn't resorted to here.

What's also interesting is that the student admits to one boneheaded action that, while it wasn't cheating, didn't help her case. She figured out during the test which SAT section was the variable one and blew it off, not realizing that if she were ever accused (and she was) of copying off a seatmate, it was her performance on this variable section (the only section differing from her seatmate's) that would suggest the true measure of her skill. This article is definitely impressive in the amount of solid information (lots) it presents vs. unsupported anti-testing cliches (none).

The tale ends with another tearjerker of a comment, of course - got to push the human interest side to keep the readers - but the article lays the framework well enough that a sympathetic yet logical reader can understand why the cheating detection system is not perfect, and why it is sometimes necessary to "catch" the innocent and "jeopardize a child for improving her score" in order to make sure that the real cheaters don't slip through the net.

Oh your cheatin' (Californian) heart

It's Friday - here's your morning coffee, your weekend weather report, and your boilerplate, predictable, nauseating "high-stakes tests make people cheat!" article:

One cheater whispered answers in students' ears as they took the exam. Another photocopied test booklets so students would know vocabulary words in advance. Another erased score sheets marked with the wrong answers and substituted correct ones. None of these violations involving California's standardized tests were committed by devious students: These sneaky offenders were teachers.

Some educators say teacher cheating comes as no surprise, given increased anxiety surrounding state tests and the federal use of them under the No Child Left Behind law.

Too bad they aren't willing to say the obvious, which is that teachers who respond to increased pressure to educate their students by cheating do not deserve the label of "educator."

"Some people feel that they need to boost test scores by hook or by crook," said Larry Ward of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a watchdog group that has criticized many standardized tests. "The more pressure, the more some people take the unethical option."

Isn't Ward saying here that teachers cannot be trusted to respond to increased standards by behaving ethically? How is that a criticism of the tests?

And as for that "pressure makes people cheat" response, would it stand up in court? Could you argue that the "high pressure" on you to get taxes in by April 15th each year excuses your cheating on them? Didn't think so.

Statewide, most testing "irregularities" are detected by a computer analysis flagging classes with unusually high numbers of erased answers. Investigations can also start with tips from parents, students or staff.

Funny, but there are some people out there who don't use higher stakes as an excuse to condone cheating. Why should we feel sorry for the teachers who do?

California Teachers Assn. President Barbara Kerr said that the union didn't excuse cheating but that she felt bad for teachers who broke rules under what she described as "horrendous" pressure.

Isn't feeling bad for these teachers one step down the slippery slope of excusing their behavior? And is the CTA doing anything to improve the situation, by, say, making sure that teachers who are hired have the moral compass and backbone to stand up to this kind of pressure?

In 2001, the state flagged test results for five Bakersfield classrooms with a lot of erasures. District officials concluded that three teachers had coached students to change answers.

Marvin Jones, director of research and evaluation for the district, said the teachers' explanations [of cheating behavior] included not understanding the rules, "everybody does it" and "I was trying to help the students do what I knew the students can do."

In other words, these are seriously clueless teachers who are falling for fallacies that we expect teenagers to disregard.

The teachers were not fired — partly because "we have unions to deal with," he said. "I hear a lot of people say that the pressure to get high test scores is so high that it drives people to use desperate measures."

So much for the unions "not condoning cheating." And how come no one ever considers the "desperate" measure of modifying the teaching technique so that material is conveyed more effectively? These tests teachers are cheating on do not measure rocket science. Why are they "desperately" trying everything except figuring out a way to convey basic skills?

Update: The Smallest Minority has some choice words for the cheatin' teachers.

Busted!

There's a reason that for-profit testing centers like Prometric forbid examinees from taking cell phones into the exam rooms - that policy prevents events like this:

School officials banned cellular telephone use after a student was caught using a camera phone to photograph an exam and trying to send it to a friend.

Last year, six University of Maryland students admitted cheating on an accounting exam by using their phones to send information to one another via text messaging.

"I'm in detention after being given a flunking score on the exam - can you hear me now?"

Cheaters never win in this classroom

On OrangePhilosophy, an essay about plagiarists and how to catch them, by Mark Steen:

...I hold that the following, if they come up, give you prima facie reasons for searching the web (or other sources). Almost none of these are at all sufficient for indicating that plagiarism has in fact occurred, however.

4. Content Indicators
...Often you’ll find a paper that roughly matches the essay assignment, but is off in certain key respects...Look for terminology that you didn’t use in the course and is unexplained in the student paper....If a paper seems eerily familiar, then it just might be because you read it earlier, and another student wrote it, or, like in several cases of mine, that you wrote it yourself. A good reason to require every student to email you a copy of their papers as well...

5. Warning signs from outside the paper itself.
Know your students. If one seems very dumb, and you can see that a certain paper is beyond them, even though it’s not very good, this of course is an indicator, though a very fallible one....if [their] second or third paper is much better than the first or second, you just might be a redneck, or, have a plagiarizer.

I have to admit, this is an issue I never had to deal with in the classroom. Then again, Steen never had to decide how much to count off for someone who makes an arithmetic mistake while calculating the components of an ANOVA table (one point if it's a small error, many points if the student ended up with negative sums of squares and didn't realize their mistake).

(Via the hopelessly honest Jane Galt).

"Self-teach" and get a good grade to boot!

When a student is caught plagiarizing, there's no need for punitive action that might harm the cheater's self-esteem, because plagiarism is "self-teaching," don't you know.

Students plagiarising internet essay material in their coursework are using a form of 'self-teaching', says the director of the qualifications body...

She told the programme: "Pupils can change the language and grammar and put it into their own words, but if they are going to that sort of effort they are essentially self-teaching and are learning the subject anyway.

Well, in the sense that reading other people's words is learning, yes, the students are "self-teaching" here. But they aren't copying other people's words for the purpose of learning; they're copying other people's words for the purpose of presenting them as their own and receiving a grade on them which is undeserved. If students aren't punished for copying, no matter how small an amount of text, and no matter how much of the accompanying text is original, then the only thing they're really learning is that it's okay to cheat, not think for oneself, and take credit for other people's work.

Presumably Dr. Searle would be offended if someone else copied "bits and pieces" from one of her journal articles, so why does she insist that allowing students to do the same is a legitimate part of the education process?

The fine line between cheating and "helping"

Two Florida teachers are under fire; both have allegedly helped students too much on the FCAT. One teacher has been dismissed, but parents are rallying around the other.

A Gator Run Elementary teacher is losing his job because officials believe he gave students answers when they took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test last spring. But a popular teacher at Virginia Shuman Young Elementary in Fort Lauderdale -- also accused of giving students too much help on the FCAT -- was the object of a support march by outraged parents who want her back in the classroom...

Prosser originally told a testing official that he had allowed students to change wrong answers, and even ''guided'' them to the right answers. But he later denied the charges, saying some kids were just angry about the amount of homework he gave them and some parents were ''out to get'' him.

Changing your story - never a good plan. And parents certainly don't seem "out to get" the other teacher who's been accused:

Parents from Virginia Shuman Young Elementary marched several blocks from their campus to the board's administrative offices to protest teacher Terina Bruening's reassignment to the book depository.

''Mrs. Bruening is the epitome of teaching students honesty and respect,'' said parent Rosa Santana, who also told board members that Bruening transformed her daughter into an Ivy League-hopeful.

So what does that mean? They don't believe their own kids? Bruening may play dodge ball during recess and communicate with the kids a great deal, but that doesn't mean that misguided compassion didn't drive her to give kids extra chances on the FCAT.

Something's fishy in Florida

How did I miss this?

When students at a Fort Lauderdale charter school for Haitians took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in spring 2002, the stakes were high. The students' poor performance the previous year had put the school in jeopardy of failing under the state's A+ plan.

When scores were released, the school had aced the Sunshine State Standards portion of the test. In math, its fourth-graders outscored those in 97 percent of Florida schools.

Some would call this "scrubbing" or "review," I'm sure, but I call it cheating. By the way, the previous year the students from this school had outscored on seven percent of Florida's youth. Quite an impressive gain, wouldn't you say?

There is construct validity evidence to suggest that more schools are cheating, but Florida officials are dragging their feet:

Although the state has rules for test security, Florida officials have not examined results that experts say are red flags. Orr said that in light of The Herald's findings, the state will now likely investigate some of those schools.

At various times in the past three years, at the Charter School Institute Training Center and other schools, that rule didn't hold up. Classes with high SSS scores and dramatic improvement scored average or below on the NRT, with little improvement.

The Manhattan Institute has gotten involved and uncovered some very interesting phenomena:

A parent at Miami-Dade's Scott Lake Elementary e-mailed the school district that her child said ''teachers were giving answers'' during the 2002 FCAT. After a school-based investigation, teachers signed a statement that they didn't cheat. The principal believes the student confused a practice test with the real exam.

The school took the test in 2003 under close supervision. Park Ridge received an F.

And so on. Expect the "blame-the-test" brigade to be in out in full force to explain that teachers, administrators, and students have no choice but to cheat, because that's all we can expect of education in Florida under the high-stakes microscope.

The "benefits" of cheating

The Kansas-City Star piles on The Perfect Score with yet another negative review (free subscrip required):

Yet another another depressing sign of the times, cheating in American high schools and colleges has become as common as pep rallies...

Their impetus: money, first love and, of course, slave-driver parents who live vicariously through them. Their all-purpose excuse: The test is racist and unfair, and knowing the answers will level the field. "They tell us to be unique, then give us a standardized test," reasons one of the team. "They are not playing fair," pouts someone else.

This review reveals a plot point that is most interesting:

The worldly, wisecracking Francesca (Johansson, losing ground gained with "Lost in Translation") is the inside person: Her father holds the keys and passwords to SAT Central....

Nice to know that the screenwriters thought it made sense for Francesca to use the alleged unfairness of the SAT as justification for doing something that could get her father fired. Or do they believe that relatives of ETS employees misbehave like this on a regular basis?

Robbins' ending combines a twist and a moral, and lets the teen conspirators off the hook with less than a rap across the knuckles. The lesson for anyone contemplating a similar "victimless" caper: Pick your confederates carefully, and just don't get caught. You'll benefit in the end.

Sad.

When "scrubbing" doesn't make things cleaner

Common Sense and Wonder, which is finally off of Blogspot (yay!), reports on the disturbing practice of test score "scrubbing." The original NY Post article is here:

Some of the city's public high schools have a dirty little secret: They're inflating Regents exam scores to give more students a passing grade, insiders told The Post. Educators even have a name for the unwritten rule: "scrubbing."

"The students of the school benefit because they pass. The school benefits because the pass rate is up," said a Staten Island high-school staffer, who, like others, requested anonymity.

As CS&W puts it:

A Win-Win! Everyone benefits, except for the student who can't get a job or make it through college because they haven't been properly prepared. If passing without proper mastery of the subjects is a benefit to the students why don't we just eliminate grades, let the kids watch movies and play in the gym for four years and then give them diplomas? Oh, sorry, that's what we're already doing.

Amen. Not only is this cheating, but it's cheating that would be hard to prove, and here's why.

Two teachers review each exam, and those scores are averaged. The use of two raters gives the scores a higher reliability if the teachers are well-trained and would be expected to give the same test similar scores. But the training is left up to the schools, and a third rater is required only if the two raters differ by more than one point (but how the third rater's score figures in isn't specified, which is surprising). That means if both teachers are wrong in the same way, a third rater doesn't enter the picture.

Now, the state apparently reviews 10% of all exams, but if a state rater gives an exam a failing score, while both teachers gave it a barely passing score, the school can argue that the teachers were just improperly trained, and not actively cheating. My guess is that the averaged teacher-assigned score can be more than one point away from the official Regents score before alarm bells go off, because the training procedure, while standardized, is done within schools, and more error in the process is to be expected.

An exam that is clearly shoddy that nonetheless receives a passing average would be strong evidence of tampering (or very bad training) - but not exams on the borderline, I'm betting. Catching students who cheat is hard enough; catching raters who cheat would be even more difficult.

The NYPost published three letters in response to the article.

Letter writer #1:

Carl Campanile's exclusive on teachers cheating was a bit comical ("Teachers Cheat; Inflating Regents Scores To Pass Kids," Jan. 26). I have been involved in grading social studies Regents exams at two New York City public high schools, and what is described goes on exactly as recounted. The "scrubbing" — I'd never heard it called that — can occur in the same room where the exams are being graded.

But the scrubbing only occurs for those who have missed the minimum passing grade by one to three points. The two essays are reviewed to make sure that the pair of teachers who originally graded them were fair.

Funny, but the Regents grading rules that I link to above don't mention any acceptable "review" to be done only for students on the borderline. Pass is pass, and fail is fail. Who decides what is "fair" for students who failed? That third rater? The same two raters who failed the student the first time around? Someone who has a vested interest in making the school's pass rate look good?

Letter writer #2:

Once again, the headline shouts scandal, while the final paragraphs of the article whisper no evidence of impropriety. "Scrubbing" is a term that's been around for decades and ensures that borderline papers, and those with widely disparate ratings between the two graders, are scrutinized by third parties to ensure the highest degree of accuracy.

As anyone who has failed the bar exam by a hair knows, an appeal can sometimes result in a passing score.

Now, this person claims that the third rater's decision is what's being called "scrubbing." That's not how it was described in the original NY Post article, which indicated that no third reviewer was involved. If a third rater reviews a failing exam and decides to pass it, that may be legitimate, as long as it's established in advance that the third rater's grade is the "gold standard." The NY Post article clearly says that the original raters are setting aside borderline exams for the purpose of re-grading them and passing them. That's not an "appeal;" that's cheating.

Letter writer #3:

Scrubbing is nothing new. When a student has a grade of 60 to 65, exam markers always reexamine the test to see if any answer was overlooked or marked incorrectly.

The students are only given one true chance to complete the exam successfully.

Again, no "review" for borderline scores is mentioned in the Regents scoring key and rating guide. If the schools have permission to do this, you wouldn't know it from viewing this key, and that makes me suspicious. The third rater is mentioned only as means to resolve two original discrepant scores, not two original borderline-failing scores. What's more, those admittedly-anonymous sources quoted in the article called it grade inflation, and the Regents spokesperson called it inappropriate.

As for that comment about "professional exams," yes, any good testing organization would make sure that the margin of error around a cutpoint was as small as possible, and there might be, for some tests, a routine re-scoring of exams close to the borderline. An acceptable policy of reviewing borderline exams might be something like the following:

1. "Borderline" would be defined in terms of area around the cutpoint in standard errors of measurement, e.g., all students within 1/2 SEM of the cutpoint are automatically rescored. Note that this includes failers and passers, and the definition of "borderline" is empirically based. An exam is only reviewed if it's close enough to the cutpoint that, given the error in the exam, the student could have scored on the other side of the cutpoint on a retake.

2. The reviewer would have to qualify as a "gold standard" through some kind of experience or training, and they would have the freedom to change scores in either direction. The reviewer would also need to be an objective, disinterested party with no connection to the two original raters (and, ideally, no information about the original score).

The situation as described by the three letter writers above is one in which reviewers are not objective, there's no indication of how the "borderline" definition was chosen, and there's no indication that borderline-passing students are ever marked down. Teachers who have every reason to want a high pass rate are being allowed to review borderline exams in order to see if a failing student can somehow be passed. That's not an objective, valid, or fair review process, and if the Regents scoring guide doesn't allow for it, it's cheating.

(If anyone has seen a copy of the Information Booklet for Administering and Scoring the Regents Examinations, for any subject, let me know. That might help clear up some of the confusion.)

Update: Devoted Reader Scott discovered that the Regents Math scoring guide does mention a review process, as follows:

All student answer papers that receive a scaled score of 60 through 64 must be scored a second time. For the second scoring, a different committee of teachers may score the student’s paper or the original committee may score the paper, except that no teacher may score the same open-ended questions that he/she scored in the first rating of the paper. The school principal is responsible for assuring that the student’s final examination score is based on a fair, accurate, and reliable scoring of the student’s answer paper.

In other words, all borderline exams get rescored, but the same teacher can't rescore the open-ended items. However, while this process is "fair" in the sense that borderline-failers get a second chance, it isn't psychometrically fair, because borderline-passers don't get reviewed as well.

What's more, because this is explicitly mentioned in the math scoring guide, the fact that it is not mentioned in the scoring guides for the English or History exams leads me to conclude that no review is in fact allowable on those exams. All three letter writers, above, define their "scrubbing" processes slightly differently, which suggests to me that schools have assumed they can "review" the English and History exams any way they see fit, simply because they are required to review the math exams as well.

The Perfect Score, but less-than-perfect reviews

The Perfect Score has finally opened, to less-than-rave reviews (some links via Joanne Jacobs). Here's a review by James Bowman:

Here are just some of the important questions asked by The Perfect Score. Is the SAT exam fair? Does it discriminate against women or minorities? Is there a bias built in by the assumptions of the mainly white male questioners? What kind of test is it really? Since it is now officially just the SAT and not the "Scholastic Aptitude Test," as it used to be, does that mean that it no longer tests aptitude? Is the meritocracy of which the SAT exam is the principal screening tool legitimate or humane? Why are people so desperate to go to a "good" college, or to college at all? Does the excessive demand for a credential justify those subject to that demand in taking any means necessary to get it?

But Brian Robbins’s film answers none of these questions. Instead it turns into a typical teen-movie designed to produce that familiar warm and fuzzy glow as all the supposedly bad kids who try to steal the answers to the the SAT from the fortress-like headquarters of the Educational Testing Service (or are they just the ETS now?) in Princeton, New Jersey, turn good in the end, and all the awkward and difficult moral issues raised by their cheating are conveniently forgotten...

Bowman isn't a fan of the test, but I'm surprised that he thinks that Hollywood, of all places, would be able to come up with an insightful review of the problems with high-stakes admission testing. Hey, that's what this blog is for.

One of my favorite reviewers, James Berardinelli, gives it a 1.5 out of 4:

I was hoping for "What if John Hughes directed a caper movie?" But if Hughes had seen this script (in which one of his films is referenced), he would have cringed. The characters are underdeveloped types, the plot is nonsensical, the caper is ludicrous, and the preachy ending is worthy of an Afterschool Special...

I was offended by the ending, which is so abysmally moralistic as to be sickening. The messages come down hard and heavy: Don't do drugs! Don't steal! Be yourself! Have confidence in your own abilities!...Next time, director Robbins and his screenwriters should spend a few hours inside a real high school rather than re-hashing stock stereotypes from bad '80s movies. Give The Perfect Score a failing grade.

What was a "Just Say No To Drugs" message doing in a movie about the SAT?

The NYT review points out that if anything is being stereotyped here, it's every movie set in an American high school. Slant Magazine was hoping for an anti-authority SAT-busting flick, but was disappointed:

The Perfect Score purports to be an anti-establishment heist flick wherein a group of desperate high school students steal the answers to the S.A.T. But in truth this is an MTV film that extreme right-wing moralists can be proud of, as it posits a quintessentially American world of racial, intellectual, and sexual conformity.

From the trailer and reviews alone, I've noticed some real boners. Such as the fact that, even though everyone loves to hate ETS, the College Board is almost never mentioned. ETS develops the SAT and scores the test items, but the SAT is actually owned by the College Board, which is in New York City, not Princeton. That's why press releases about the SAT don't come from ETS.

From the trailer, too, it looks like the students are breaking into ETS, only the building doesn't look like anything I've ever seen on ETS's campus, or anywhere in Princeton, for that matter. And how would the students know the exact location where the tests are being published (as opposed to developed)? And I wonder what made the screenwriters so sure that, on each testing date, only one SAT form is administered? Just curious.

Unsurprisingly, some news articles are using the movie as an excuse to repeat statements about the test's mythological "bias":

If anything, the MTV-produced film validates how crucial the test has become now that most college-bound students have no choice but to whip out No. 2 pencils and fill in tiny ovals for three hours.

At what magical time in the past, oh, thirty years or so, was the SAT not crucial? If anything, with affirmative action policies and universities that gun for "diversity," it's less crucial now.

And it spotlights the lengths to which some students will go to beat the system and the efforts the ETS takes to keep that from happening. "The Perfect Score" centers on that very temptation: cheating.

Critics have denounced the test over the years as biased against women, the poor and minorities, for allegedly not showing the true worth of a person, for reducing everyone to a number.

The comments about bias against women, poor, and minorities are relatively unsupported, and the comments about the "true worth" of a person are just ridiculous. The SAT has never claimed to measure true worth, and the instructions for valid use of the SAT have never included using that score, and only that score, to determine whether a particular applicant is suitable for a particular college.

As I've pointed out before, there are mean score differences, and, depending on the weight the SAT score is given in admissions, there can be differential impact on different groups. But this is not the same things as bias; in fact, it's neither necessary nor sufficient evidence of bias.

The test is worthless and "discriminates against a lot of people," declares Aileen Loli, 18, a Chamblee High School senior who came to Atlanta from Peru four years ago and has struggled with the verbal portion of the test.

The one quote this reporter was able to dig up was from a test-taker? And this proves what, again?

So cheating happens. The ETS acknowledges it. About 300 tests a year are thrown out for suspected cheating, the company says.

Wonder why the article doesn't mention that almost 2 million SATs are administered each year? Why, that means a whopping .015% of test takers have their tests discarded.

To fight back, the ETS has a tipster hotline and uses proctors to ferret out scammers. It will also flag any score that rises at least 350 points (out of a possible 1600) above a preceding score. The company then looks for a pattern of similar answers where the student took the test.

With college application deadlines tight (most of them have now passed for seniors), many students will simply cancel the disputed score and retake the test to prove that the score was legitimate. An option seldom used by the ETS is sending the score to colleges with a note about the alleged cheating attached and letting the colleges themselves decide the merits of the case.

Unfortunately, yes, the burden is on the test taker. But that score change of 350 points wasn't chosen at random. That's a deviation that reflects a change in true underlying ability that is extremely rare in the population of test takers (especially if seen in adjacent administrations). Doesn't mean it's impossible; just means it's highly unlikely.

Another high school student sums the whole thing up pretty well:

Taylor Barnes, 17, a junior at Fayette County High, says the film's premise makes her blanch.

"It looks really lame," she says. "They think teens will want to watch that? Movies are for entertainment. SATs are not for entertainment."

Update: Now the ACT folks are weighing in on the movie:

Representatives from another standardized test — the ACTs — voiced concerns earlier in the week about improper messages sent by the movie. "We think the movie implies these tests are designed to keep students out of school, and that is not the case at all," said ACT spokesman Ken Gullette...

Fellow ESU freshman Mike Brostowski put it in terms any parent can relate to: "It's like winning the lottery — we all dream about it but who does it actually happen to?"

Doubts rise as test scores fall

Now a school in Southeast Washington, DCm is under suspicion of cheating, thanks to roller-coaster Stanford 9 scores:

Less than two years ago, Moten Elementary in Southeast Washington celebrated a sharp rise in standardized test scores that placed its students among the most accomplished in the school system.

Twelve months later, the scores plunged. Now, Moten's results on the Stanford 9 Achievement Test are among the lowest of the more than 100 public elementary schools in the District...

In the spring of 2002, only 3.3 percent of Moten's students tested in math scored "below basic" -- the Stanford 9's lowest category of scoring -- and 2.4 percent tested below basic in reading. But results from the spring test in 2003, which were released in the fall, showed 69 percent of its students scoring below basic in math and 55 percent scoring below basic in reading. The steep declines occurred in grades 4 through 6.

Something's not right here. The Stanford 9 didn't move the goalposts, or we would have seen these results everywhere. Did the type of student (i.e., special education or not) change from 2002 to 2003? Even that wouldn't necessarily explain this. But cheating - as in, changing answer sheets, or giving students the answers - would.

What's the school district going to do about it? Nothing.

Caritj said the school system is not planning to investigate further -- or to interview school staff members who were present at the exam -- because nobody has come forward to claim that cheating occurred. The principal who presided over the 2002 testing has retired; and the 2003 data appear legitimate and can be used to guide instruction...

One of those teachers, Kelly Knepper, said that in the 1999-2000 school year, the first 10 students on her class's alphabetical roster scored in the top percentiles on the Stanford 9, yet her other 10 students scored poorly. One student was having trouble subtracting 3 from 5 just two days before the test, yet scored in the 99th percentile in math, the former fifth-grade teacher said.

Yep, sounds like somebody cooked the books that year, and it seems the guilty parties will go unpunished. The kids, however, are now suffering, because the new and presumably correct test results indicate that the school is doing a lousy job of educating its students. A fifth-grade teacher claims that one of her students couldn't subtract 3 from 5? A first-grader should be able to do that - on his fingers, perhaps, but still.

Cheating expert, fellow psychometrician, and all-around nice guy Greg Cizek is on the spot with a comment:

Gregory J. Cizek, who teaches educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he suspects that answer sheets were changed. "My hunch is there's some point in the handling of these documents that they've been altered," said Cizek, who is the author of the book "Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It and Prevent It."

"I'm trying to think of any other plausible explanation, but I'm just not able to come up with one," he said.

Read more about Dr. Cizek's work here.

A charge of manipulated test scores

A wrongful-termination lawsuit has been filed in the US District Court that accuses East High School (Colorado) of fudging test score numbers:

A former East High School teacher assigned to improve the school's standardized test scores filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit Tuesday that accuses school officials of forcing disabled and minority students out of the school to improve test results. The lawsuit that Donna Otabachian filed in U.S. District Court also accused officials at East High of undermining attempts to help those students do better on the Colorado Scholastic Assessment Program, or CSAP, test.

Otabachian said she lost her job at East High after complaining to district officials and teachers union officials about the situation. She said she also was wrongly accused of stealing computers and of incompetence. Union officials themselves opposed efforts to improve test scores because that would have meant greater accountability for teachers, Otabachian alleged...

This is your brain, when you believe cheating is okay

Professor and writer Marianne Jennings describes the horrible experience of speaking at a local high school:

...54+ semesters of grades and 13 years of columns did not prepare me for my speech vis-à-vis cheating and ethics at a local high school...Suffice it to say that the school was in greater Phoenix and was not a victim of urban blight.

There was growing insurrection as I outlined the consequences of cheating. They booed, and then they laughed hysterically. The infomercial administrator called in security to man the aisles. I had visions of pitch forks storming the stage. They soon stopped listening. A couple in the front row needed abstinence training, most particularly its importance in public auditoriums.

Yeesh. Ms. Jennings concludes that this boorish reception was due to the general perception that "ethics don't matter" - to either the students, or their caretakers:

Last year several students at this school cheated on a math final. When the instructor proposed a penalty, the parents protested mightily. No action was taken against the students.

Appalling.

Character vs. good grades

Five students from the high-performing Saratoga High School are under investigation for cheating:

At least five Saratoga High School students have been suspended, three of them facing possible expulsion, for allegedly stealing English department tests, grades and curriculum and giving or selling them to other students. Three other students also are being investigated, one for allegedly trying to change a math grade and the others for taking hard copies of a test.

"We harp on kids so much to do good in school, but what we really want to be is decent people," Skelly said Friday as the allegations came to light.

Something about this doesn't sit right with me, but I'm not sure what it is. Perhaps it's the assumption here that parents are, in fact, emphasizing nothing except the need for good grades. Or perhaps it's the feeling I get that Skelly believes that harping on kids to do good in school, and harping on kids to be decent people, are mutually exclusive. Perhaps I've read too many articles about cheating kids where the onlookers blame the stakes, and not the kids, for the duplicitous behavior. I suppose I should just be happy that here the behavior is resulting in an appropriate punishment.

East St. Louis cheating probe widens

Oh, my. A second East St. Louis school is under investigation for fishy behavior, and it appears a few folks have been busily obtaining test materials in an unauthorized fashion:

Dick Barrett, the inspector general for District 189's state financial oversight panel, is probing purchase orders linked to Terrence Curry, the former principal of Younge Middle School.

LeCompte also is president of the East St. Louis teachers union.

Previous reports on this scandal here, here, and here.

Demotions in St. Louis

The "hammer" has fallen on administrators in the middle of St. Louis's test cheating scandal:

The superintendent of East St. Louis schools must answer tough questions about his district's test scores. Dr. Nate Anderson is meeting with the state superintendent of schools Monday night, to explain why dozens of special education students at several schools didn't take state achievement tests.

Among the issues of concern, the breaking of standardized testing rules regarding special education students. The testing mixup involves just over 50 special needs children attending one middle school and three elementary schools who were not given standardized tests as by law.

Those demoted were the principals of the schools in which testing "mixups" were identified, and two administrators of special needs programs.

Secrets and Lies in Illinois

The Illinois test cheating scandal takes a weird new turn:

Nate Anderson, the superintendent of District 189, refused to turn over a box full of blank standardized test answer sheets to the school district's inspector general Thursday.

Anderson allowed Barrett to inspect the box Thursday afternoon. But the superintendent refused to allow Barrett to carry out the box, which contained 11 packets of blank Iowa Test answer sheets.

Fighting over blank answer sheets? Where the heck is this investigation going to end up? And by the way, they were looking for exams:

A box of standardized tests mysteriously shows up at East St. Louis Senior High School. The only person with the authority to order them denies doing so. Meanwhile, an Illinois State Board of Education probe into test cheating keeps expanding, and could cost as many as six District 189 school principals their jobs.

Suspicions have arisen that some senior District 189 administrators might have known of some school principals' efforts to exclude nearly 160 special education students from the Illinois Standards Achievement Test in April.

More cheating detected in Illinois

I've posted before about the evidence of standardized test cheating in Illinois. Now the cheating probe is widening to include other schools:

A state investigation into cheating on standardized tests at Younge Middle School is expanding to include other District 189 schools. The Illinois State Board of Education probe was triggered after it learned Younge's principal had excluded about 100 special education students from taking the Illinois Standards Achievement Test -- a breach of federal law.

Although the state probe is not yet finished -- data from three schools have not yet been submitted -- board investigators have discovered that special education students at other District 189 schools also were kept from taking the ISAT, state Superintendent Robert Schiller said.

I've always thought that any aspect of NCLB that was going to raise the most outcry - and prompt the most reform in both NCLB and other laws - would be the special education issues. Some schools are complaining that including special education students is meaningless and gives the school a bad reputation; other schools apparently have decided to ignore the special education testing requirements.

Cheaters never win - in Illinois

Last Thursday, it was reported that a professor from the University of Chicago had been hired to analyze the fluctuating test scores from Illinois's School District 189. This district encompasses poverty-stricken East St. Louis, and the professor, one Dr. Steven Levitt, has developed statistical methods that uncover cheating behavior.

It was Dr. Levitt's methods that were used to uncover a rash of teachers who were cheating in Chicago last year (lucky for Dr. Levitt that all these rich datasets were available, eh?). State panel member Richard Mark is sure that something fishy is happening with Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) scores in East St. Louis as well. Dr. Levitt is not charging for his services, which involves the assessment of large spikes in test scores followed by a leveling off, or even a decline, in scores after the effect of cheating disappears.

And what do you know? Today, we read that Younge Middle School in East St. Louis, which posted a big jump in test scores last year, tested only 69% of the school's eligible students that year (NCLB requires that 95% of each subgroup be tested). Those excluded were, apparently, primarily Younge's special education students:

Younge Middle School students posted some of District 189's highest standardized test scores last spring after dozens of special education students were kept from taking the test.

Interviews with Younge students and their parents...indicate nearly 100 Younge special education students failed to take the ISAT in April. Meanwhile, a similar number of special education students in grades six through eight were barred from taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills last week.

Principal Curry earns over $70,000 a year, and it's not yet been decided what, if any, punishment he will recieve. Dr. Levitt is still scheduled to examine the rest of the scores in the area, but it doesn't take a U of Chicago egghead to figure out where the problem lies at Younge Middle School.

Their cheatin' hearts

Newsday is running a double-barred "AP Exclusive" on New York teachers who help students cheat on standardized exams. The main article is here, a side article that provides some additional detail is here.

How did the AP uncover the cheating? And just how bad is it?

From 1999 through the spring of 2002, state records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law included 21 cases of proven cheating by teachers from Buffalo to Long Island. Teachers usually reported cheating but some said the practice is more common than records show.

Teachers usually report themselves cheating, or they report other teachers? That statement could have been a bit more clear.

Teachers have read off answers during a test, sent students back to correct wrong answers, photocopied secure tests for use in class, inflated scores, and peeked at questions then drilled those topics in class before the test...

"Teachers care a lot, sometimes they care too much and try to provide too much help," said Dennis Tompkins, spokesman for New York State United Teachers, the state's largest teachers' union. "We moved in a complete new direction in the last seven years. The standards are higher."

Does that mean that if I, as a student, let my friend copy off my answer sheet, I shouldn't be punished because I "care too much" about my friend's GPA? I mean, come on. That excuse wouldn't get a student off the hook, and it shouldn't get a teacher off the hook, either.

The public knows that most teachers care a great deal about their students, but any teacher who believes that it is compassionate to help students cheat should be removed from the classroom. It's ludicrous that this is being floated as an excuse/explanation for deceptive behavior that, essentially, covers up the fact that students haven't learned the material, or that teachers haven't done their jobs. Why is it being spun as misplaced compassion, rather than a desperate cover-up for poor teaching skills?

[State Deputy Education Commissioner James] Kadamus said most of the cheating is in elementary and middle schools, not the high schools where so-called high stakes testing can determine whether a student graduates. In the lower grades, standardized tests are used to judge the performance of schools and teachers in "school report cards."

The assumption that cheating teachers are being "compassionate" is therefore even less likely, because it's not the kids who get negative feedback for low scores in the lower grades.

"If students' have academic weaknesses, their teachers need to strive to fix it, not cover it up and refuse to acknowledge it exists," said Andrea Rogers, research associate at the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability. " ... New York should instantly revoke the license of any teacher who is found guilty of committing testing fraud."

Most of the teachers quit, were suspended or fired or were subject to a state disciplinary process that could lead to dismissal.

Good. The state is sending a message that cheating won't be tolerated, no matter what the root cause is.

And then there's the obligatory quote by a researcher who wants readers to assume that high stakes exams cause cheating, and that teachers who "help" their kids on such exams do so only because of "compassion":

"We found cheating increased by 30 to 50 percent because of high-stakes testing," said Brian Jacobs of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and co-author of the teacher-cheating report "Rotten Apples."

"Classrooms where they have lower achieving students on average are more likely to cheat," Jacobs said of the Chicago study. "That could be some indication of a benevolent motivation on the part of the teachers, or on the other hand it could show motivation that they are trying to improve classroom test scores for themselves."

Emphases mine. I haven't read the study, but unless they randomly assigned teachers and students to take different exams, and observed that only the teachers who were asked to give high-stakes exams cheated, then the researchers haven't shown that high-stakes exams are the reason that cheating has increased. My guess is that they've found a correlation between the presence of high-stakes exams and the presence of cheating, and they've mistakenly concluded that the exams cause cheating. It's a fine point, and they're deliberately blurring it here.

Oh, and one other interpretation for the fact that classrooms with low-performing students may show more cheating behavior is that the teachers in those classrooms may be more incompetent, and more desperate to compensate for their poor teaching skills. Thus, in a high-stakes situation, it's poor teaching skills that lead to cheating AND to poor test performance.

That's certainly an alternate explanation that covers all the facts, and to me, it's just as likely as the "benevolent motivation" theory that Mr. Jacobs has suggested.

The newest suing student, update

In my previous post about Anton Rozenbaum's lawsuit , I noted that Nick of Twilight of the Idols had a different perspective on the situation. I thought that Nick's argument that perhaps the student was railroaded by the professor sounded reasonable; maybe I was too quick to assume that the student's lawsuit had no merit.

On the other hand, maybe I wasn't. I decided to check out Northwestern's rules of the rules for dealing with academic dishonesty. According to the procedures listed on this page, Professor Sontheimer could not have lowered the grade to an F by himself without due process, as is suggested in the original article, and in the lawsuit. The academic dean would have had to approve the grade change, and my guess is that the dean would have required sufficient evidence. If Sontheimer was smart enough to photocopy exams before handing them back, then the photocopy, plus Rozenbaum's copy with his "notes," could have been enough. This doesn't prove that Sontheimer's version of events is right, of course, but it does reduce the probability that he could have "railroaded" Rozenbaum into an F, as Nick suggested...

And given that Northwestern allows for expulsion with cheating, Rozenbaum should be lucky that he received only an F for the course (at least, that's the assumption I made, because the article doesn't mention expulsion. Neither does this one.) That F kept him from graduating on time, but not, presumably, from reenrolling and retaking the course.

Is it still likely, or even possible, that Professor Sontheimer punished Anton unfairly? Or did Rozenbaum, like some other highly-stressed overachiever I could mention, ultimately shoot himself in the foot by refusing to settle for something perfectly good that nonetheless wasn't up to his standards?

Shady dealings at Sharpstown High

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is investigating a series of high schools in the Houston area for being "lax when dealing with data oversight." The investigation began with the allegation that Sharpstown High provided false documentation of dropout rates:

A report from the Texas Education Agency blames the Houston Independent School District's decentralization, which gives principals latitude in many areas, for problems with that oversight...

"Data integrity has nothing to do with decentralization," Robert Kimball said. "Administrators were overseeing the data, and they were the ones manipulating the data."

Ms. Boysza's "sticky" situation

A former teacher, Beth L. Boysza, is suing her school superintendent, school board and school district after she was suspended for allegedly helping her Horace Mann Elementary School (PA) students cheat on the New Standards Math Reference Exam through the use of "sticky notes." What makes this interesting is that she claims her suspension is really due to an earlier harassment claim she had filed against a principal at another school.

Let's suss all this out, shall we?

Previously, Boysza, who has taught more than 15 years, taught kindergarten at Fort Pitt Elementary, where she filed a harassment complaint with the school district's office of equity, compliance and community relations against then-Principal Kevin Bivins.

The suit does not elaborate on the improprieties.

So she did something wrong at the kindergarten (that's grist for the imagination mill) and her suspension for it was more than for other teachers who committed the same improprieties.

Then she moves to an elementary school (whatever she did wrong at the kindergarten, it wasn't bad enough to prevent her being hired to teach slightly-older kids) and now she's in trouble for helping kids cheat. But here's what she claimed really happened:

The district trained her in a technique to use sticky notes as an "effective means for teacher-student communication." The district also encouraged teacher to re-read math questions for students who couldn't read the questions so that reading difficulties wouldn't hinder math performance...

"At no time did Mrs. Boysza provide substantive answers to any test question."

Why do teachers have to be trained to use Post-It notes? Does the district think teachers won't understand the self-explanatory use of these little pieces of paper? And while it seems the district gave her permission to read items to students, I doubt it gave her permission to rephrase the questions and then substitute her sticky-note questions for the real ones in the test books.

After a parent complained, Principal Lonnie Folino and Boysza discussed the situation in April, and he concluded she had "done nothing wrong."

Thompson two weeks later urged the board to fire Boysza and noted she was the "teacher that caused all the problems at Fort Pitt Elementary."

The school district, of course, denies that Ms. Boysza's problems at Fort Pitt had anything to do with her current situation. She's claiming to have suffered severe "emotional distress," and wants reparations to the tune of $35,000 for the suspension, which, given that she's been suspended without pay since May of this year, doesn't sound like an outrageous amount of money to be asking for. If she's not guilty, that is.

Here's the original story from April of this year:

It started out as one of those routine, "how-was-your-day-at-school-dear" conversations. It led to a teacher's suspension, an investigation into cheating allegations, and parents worried their children might be punished for whistle-blowing...

"Honey, do you know your teacher is cheating?" Yurkovich asked her son.

"Clues about answers that were wrong" - that definitely doesn't jibe with Ms. Boysza's claim that she provided no "substantive answers" to the test items. And it appears that at least one kid had saved the sticky notes (kids will collect anything), which contained "rephrasings" such as "Whats is the difference? Subtract!", "how many choices?", and "check." That definitely crosses the line from reading the items out loud to helping students answer the item, which is cheating.

Oddly, though, all the school's fourth-grade teachers were placed on leave on May 12, "for the remainder of the school year," due to alleged "unforeseen medical/personal issues." When substitute teachers were placed in the classrooms, the kids became more unruly. And the administration singled out only a few children from Ms. Boyzsa's classroom for interrogation; by not questioning all the kids, they left open the possibility that these "whistle-blowers" will face retribution from those parents and kids who want Ms. Boyzsa back.

Another interesting point is that the exam in question is not state-mandated, nor is it a high-stakes exit exam. It is used in accountability, and the principals use it to see how the students in each class are faring, but a teacher's job status doesn't depend on the test results.

The standard FairTest blather about how high-stakes cause cheating (despite the fact that this wasn't a high-stakes exam) is repeated here, with the usual lack of judgment for people who just have to cheat under pressure. And the records show that Ms. Boysza did attend a math-testing training session where she was exposed to instructions that were quite clear:

"Responses to test items must represent the pupil's own independent and unaided thinking and must remain unchanged after test administration is complete."

The teacher may "explain or repeat directions, but you may not provide any assistance with the mathematics questions or give any hints or answers pertaining to the content of the examination."

Emphases mine. I believe that even Ms. Boysza's own testimony shows she did not follow these rules, not if she rephrased items so that students were aided in figuring out the answers. This doesn't mean she's a bad teacher, but obviously no one made it clear to hear that one can "help" students a bit too much on exams, and that this sort of "help" benefits no one.

When crime DOES pay

Students in Illinois saw a boost in test scores because their principal gave them a sneak peek at the Prairie State standardized test before it was administered. In other words, he helped them cheat - but he's being suspended with pay:

The scandal started last April, when students were about to take the Prairie State standardized exam. Students were given what they thought was a practice test to prepare for the real thing. But on test day, many students realized that the practice test was the real test.

Several students at the board meeting did talk to Cordell. One said he found it ironic that the student athletes at the school are always reminded, "cheaters never win."

Oh, but cheaters who are protected by the NEA do get paid.

Update: Devoted Reader Michael has slapped my knuckles with a ruler and told me to knock off the knee-jerk anti-unionism. I won't stop picking at teachers' unions, because I don't agree with them, but in this case my NEA comment was not only tacky but wrong. Michael says that principals are generally not union members.

Ow. Those rulers hurt.