Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Friday, May 26, 2006
How common is cheating?
Joshua Benton, who used to work at the Toledo Blade in Ohio, has done some great work with his Dallas Morning News colleagues writing about cheating on the state test in Texas.
The Morning News wrote an award-winning series about this a couple years ago, and guess who the cheaters were? Not the kids.
Benton and his colleagues found adults in the schools who were cheating.
Now Benton is back with another story showing cheating is still common in Texas. Through data and computer analysis, the state can discover unlikely patterns, such as a whole class of kids who gave the exact same answer on 15 questions in a row. They can also look at an “erasure study,” which looks for groups of score sheets that have large blocks of answers erased and changed.
This problem, unfortunately, is a natural byproduct of high stakes testing. Principals and teachers know their jobs are on the line and for some the temptation to improve their hand is too great. But the effects for the kids are awful. Kids tell stories of teachers giving them the answers brazenly or handing them score sheets that already are marked. What a horrible lesson to learn from your teacher. Not to mention those phony scores give everyone a false sense of how kids are performing, and may prevent them from getting needed interventions.
If this problem is happening in Texas, it’s certainly happening elsewhere, even Ohio. The question is how widespread is the problem here? Anyone have any thoughts about how much it happens here or personal experience with cheating teachers?
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