You might think that the sophistication of teachers who cheat would increase along with the level of schooling. But an exam given at the University of Georgia in the fall of 2001 disputes that idea. The course was called Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball, and the final grade was based on a single exam that had twenty questions. Among the questions: Read the rest of this entry »
So a blend was settled upon. More than half of the 120 retested classrooms were those suspected of having a cheating teacher. The remainder were divided between the supposedly excellent teachers (high scores but no suspicious answer patterns) and, as a further control, classrooms with mediocre scores and no suspicious answers. The retest was given a few weeks after the original exam. The children were not told the reason for the retest. Neither were the teachers. But they may have gotten the idea when it was announced that CPS officials, not the teachers, would administer the test. The teachers were asked to stay in the classroom with their students, but they would not be allowed to even touch the answer sheets. The results were as compelling as the cheating algorithm had predicted. Read the rest of this entry »
Most academic analyses of this sort tend to languish, unread, on a dusty library shelf. But in early 2002, the new CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan, contacted the study’s authors. He didn’t want to protest or hush up their findings. Rather, he wanted to make sure that the teachers identified by the algorithm as cheaters were truly cheating—and then do something about it. Read the rest of this entry »
An analysis of the entire Chicago data reveals evidence of teacher cheating in more than two hundred classrooms per year, roughly 5 percent of the total. This is a conservative estimate, since the algorithm was able to identify only the most egregious form of cheating— in which teachers systematically changed students’ answers—and not the many subtler ways a teacher might cheat. In a recent study among North Carolina schoolteachers, some 35 percent of the respondents said they had witnessed their colleagues cheating in some fashion, whether by giving students extra time, suggesting answers, or manually changing students’ answers. Read the rest of this entry »
Another indication of teacher cheating in classroom A is the class’s overall performance. As sixth graders who were taking the test in the eighth month of the academic year, these students needed to achieve an average score of 6.8 to be considered up to national standards. (Fifth graders taking the test in the eighth month of the year needed to score 5.8, seventh graders 7.8, and so on.) The students in classroom A averaged 5.8 on their sixth-grade tests, which is a full grade level below where they should be. So plainly these are poor students. A year earlier, however, these students did even worse, averaging just 4.1 on their Read the rest of this entry »
If you guessed that classroom A was the cheating classroom, congratulations. Here again are the answer strings from classroom A, now reordered by a computer that has been asked to apply the cheating algorithm
and seek out suspicious patterns.
Take a look at the answers in bold. Did fifteen out of twenty-two students somehow manage to reel off the same six consecutive correct answers (the d-a-d-b-c-b string) all by themselves? There are at least four reasons this is unlikely. One: those questions, coming near the end of the test, were harder than the earlier Read the rest of this entry »
Now it was time to construct an algorithm that could tease some conclusions from this mass of data. What might a cheating teacher’s classroom look like?
The first thing to search for would be unusual answer patterns in a given classroom: blocks of identical answers, for instance, especially among the harder questions. If ten very bright students (as indicated by past and future test scores) gave correct answers to the exam’s first five questions (typically the easiest ones), such an identical block shouldn’t be considered suspicious. But if ten poor students gave correct Read the rest of this entry »
To catch a cheater, it helps to think like one. If you were willing to erase your students’ wrong answers and fill in correct ones, you probably wouldn’t want to change too many wrong answers. That would clearly be a tip-off. You probably wouldn’t even want to change answers on every student’s test—another tip-off. Nor, in all likelihood, would you have enough time, because the answer sheets are turned in soon after the test is over. So what you might do is select a string of eight or ten consecutive questions and fill in the correct answers for, say, one-half or two-thirds of your students. You could easily memorize a short pattern of Read the rest of this entry »
How might a teacher go about cheating? There are any number of possibilities, from the brazen to the sophisticated. A fifth-grade student in Oakland recently came home from school and gaily told her mother that her super-nice teacher had written the answers to the state exam right there on the chalkboard. Such instances are certainly rare, for placing your fate in the hands of thirty prepubescent witnesses doesn’t seem like a risk that even the worst teacher would take. (The Oakland teacher was duly fired.) There are more subtle ways to inflate students’ scores. A teacher can simply give students extra time to complete the Read the rest of this entry »
Advocates of high-stakes testing argue that it raises the standards of learning and gives students more incentive to study. Also, if the test prevents poor students from advancing without merit, they won’t clog up the higher grades and slow down good students. Opponents, meanwhile, worry that certain students will be unfairly penalized if they don’t happen to test well, and that teachers may concentrate on the test topics at the exclusion of more important lessons. Read the rest of this entry »