You are here: Home / Archives for cheating

Cheating is not a big deal

April 8, 2013 by

The Atlanta cheating indictments — from the former superintendent down to principals and teachers — have brought calls to eliminate test-based accountability measures. If there’s no incentive to cheat, there’ll be no cheating, the argument goes.  Minimizing cheating shouldn’t be the top priority, argues Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine.

Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat.

. . . If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can’t keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use.

Students have been cheating on tests forever — massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat.

Standardized test scores “account for no more than half of the criteria” for evaluating teachers in any state, Chait writes. Classroom evaluations and other factors count for the rest.

 States use complex models to measure how much a class increased its performance from the beginning to the end of the school year, accounting for socioeconomic conditions and other factors.

“There’s a useful debate to be had over how to design the criteria for measuring effective teachers,” he writes, but minimizing cheating is not the top priority. “The top priority should be teaching students better.”

The Atlanta scandal wasn’t about teachers cheating to look better. It was about administrators pressuring teachers to make low-performing schools look better. That’s true in Philadelphia’s cheating scandal too.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Philly sanctions two principals for cheating

April 7, 2013 by

After a nearly two-year-old investigation into cheating on state  tests at 53 Philadelphia public schools, two principals have surrendered their administrative credentials.

Barbara McCreery, who oversaw astronomical test score gains in 2010 at Communications Technology High in Southwest Philadelphia, was alleged to have “violated the integrity and security of the PSSA by erasing and changing student answers, creating an answer key and manipulating student data.”

Lola Marie O’Rourke, former principal of Locke Elementary in West Philadelphia, faced similar allegations, including that she directly provided answers to students.

McCreery was fired as principal of Bok Tech. O’Rourke left the district to work as an administrator in Trenton, New Jersey. Both will retain their teaching certificates but won’t be able to teach in the Philadelphia School District. Neither will be eligible to work as a principal in Pennsylvania.

The cheating investigation is continuing. Will there be indictments, as in Atlanta? Retiring a few years early or taking an out-of-state job isn’t much of a punishment.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , ,

If reform fails . . .

April 4, 2013 by

If education reform fails, what will happen? Two Washington Post op-eds preview the future, writes Eduwonk.

Michael Gerson lauds the spread of choice and increasing chances that it could happen at scale.  On the same page Eugene Robinson announces that Atlanta shows the folly of incentives linked to testing.

Both show what’s likely if reform efforts collapse, writes Eduwonk.  ”

It’s not a return to the old days of benign neglect where the money flowed pretty freely and consequences were scarce.”

 Instead, he predicts more choice, less accountability and limited funding.

Choice without accountability is not

the “formula for widespread improvement,” he writes.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Ex-superintendent indicted for Atlanta cheating

March 30, 2013 by

Former Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 others were indicted Friday on charges they conspired to cheat on standardized tests from at least 2005 to 2010, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which conducted the investigation that revealed widespread cheating.

Further, the grand jury charged, Hall, several top aides, principals and teachers engaged in the scheme for their own financial gain. And with investigators closing in, the jury said, Hall and others lied to cover up their crimes.

. . . Pressuring subordinates to produce targeted scores, the indictment said, “created an environment where achieving the desired end result was more important than the students’ education.”

“This is nothing but pervasive and rank thuggery,” said Richard Hyde, one of the special investigators.

The indictment served as a resounding refutation of Hall’s assertions that Atlanta had found the secret formula that had long eluded educators elsewhere: how to get strong performances from poor, mostly minority students in decaying urban schools. For her efforts, Hall was named the national superintendent of the year in 2009.

Hall collected more than $225,000 in bonuses in 2007 to 2009 by certifying test scores “which she knew were false,” the grand jury found. Her base salary exceeded $300,000 by 2009.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , ,

A little help from my friends

March 12, 2013 by

On Assorted Stuff, Tim wants to flip the anti-cheating statement: “I have neither given nor received help on this assignment.” He proposes:

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

College cheaters become adult cheaters

December 21, 2012 by

Students who cheat and lie in college are likely to behave dishonestly in the workforce, according to a University of Minnesota study, which relied on self reporting.

Among the types of cheating examined were increasing the margins or typeface to make a paper seem longer, telling an instructor a false reason for missing a class or exam, obtaining questions to an exam from an unauthorized person before a test, writing a paper for someone else and preparing cheat sheets.

Those types of unethical actions in college were found to carry over into the workplace in the forms of taking long lunches, telling an employer a fake reason for missing work, writing a report for a co-worker, filling out a false expense report and presenting the ideas of co-workers as their own.

Dishonesty “tends to carry over” from college to adult life, Nathan Kuncel, the study’s co-author, told BusinessNewsDaily.

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , ,

Tutors or cheaters?

December 1, 2012 by

Wealthy parents are hiring “tutors” to do their children’s work through private school — and sometimes college, reports the New York Post. Eager to get their kids into elite colleges by any means necessary, parents go online to find “legit and not-so-legit tutors, homework helpers and ghostwriters.”

“Charles” put himself through medical school and put a down payment on an apartment with $150,000 he earned over six years of ghostwriting for a single student.

The mother — a college professor — demanded Charles “tutor” her 15-year-old sophomore son by completing every homework assignment and writing every paper and college essay. . . .

Once the boy was off to his out-of-state private university, he flunked out after less than one year without the coddling of a tutor.

. . . And when the student was enrolled at a less-competitive school back in New York, Charles was pulled back in at the mother’s urging: “I was back in the picture in the same way as before: coming over five or six days a week. They paid for my apartment,” he says.

Teachers notice when mediocre students turn in “grad-school-like” papers, a private school teacher tells the Post.

“We would have staff meetings to discuss tutors: How do we grade this essay, knowing a tutor is crafting it? It puts teachers in an awkward position, because you don’t want to accuse the kid. Teachers can’t keep up with all the ways kids are cheating these days.”

It sounds as though private schools don’t want to confront parents who are paying the tuition bill as well as the ghost-writer’s bill.

College admissions officers also see a lot of ghost-written or mom-written essays. I wonder if there’s any point in requiring an essay.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Ex-principal: Adult cheating hurts students

November 30, 2012 by

Test scores were up sharply at Communications Technology High in Philadelphia. The new principal, Saliyah Cruz, wondered how so many students could score proficient on the state exam while also testing into remedial reading and math. Two years later, an investigation found evidence of cheating by adults, reports NewsWorks and Philadelphia Notebook. Students paid a high price, says Cruz, who quit in frustration.

In 2010, 75 percent of 11th graders at Comm Tech scored proficient or above in reading. That was a 22 percentage-point jump over the previous year. In math, 70 percent of Comm Tech 11th graders scored proficient or above, 40 points higher than the year before.

. . . In both 2009 and 2010, a high number of student response sheets at Comm Tech had suspicious patterns of “wrong-to-right” erasures – a telltale sign of adult cheating.

When Cruz asked the school’s staff why scores had soared, they credited “Study Island,” a computer-based test prep program used at many Philadelphia public schools. Cruz expanded use of Study Island.

Reports generated by Study Island suggested that students didn’t understand the material. Interim tests used to predict PSSA performance pointed to huge score drops. Cruz’s own eyes told her that students weren’t learning.

Her staff resisted her efforts to get teachers to “change their instruction or re-teach content.” After all, the test scores were great.

As a result, says Cruz, students at Comm Tech got a Band-Aid when what they really needed was surgery.

With Cruz as principal, there were no more suspicious erasures. The school’s scores dropped 38 points in reading and 45 points in math.

At the district level, principals were pushed to show rapid gains, Cruz says. Slow, steady improvement was not good enough. Principals under suspicion of cheating have been promoted, including Cruz’s predecessor at Comm Tech, reports NewsWorks and Notebook.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , ,

Cheaters don’t want to ‘be a cheater’

November 9, 2012 by

People like to think of themselves as “basically honest,” even though they’re willing to cheat, writes Dan Willingham in An Easy Trick to Reduce Cheating.

An experimenter asked people on the Stanford campus to play a game to determine “the rate of cheating” (or “the number of cheaters”) without knowing who’s “cheating” (“a cheater”).

Subjects were asked to pick a number from 1 to 10, and then were told that if they had picked an even number they would receive $5, but if the number were odd, they would receive nothing.

When the experimenter used the word “cheater” 21% of subjects reported having picked an even number, but when “cheating” was used, 50% did. (Other research has shown that there is a strong bias to pick odd numbers in the task; that’s why the rates are so low.)

It should work with students in middle or high school, Willingham thinks.

In short, the ideal is to remind people of their best side, their good intentions, and then remind them that cheating–sorry, being a cheater–is not compatible with their image of themselves.

At the end of sophomore year in high school, my daughter told me that a classmate had stolen the Spanish teacher’s book, photocopied all the tests and returned the book.  The cheater had given copies of the tests to any student who wanted them. My daughter was in the small minority who refused to cheat. “I would have had to come up with some reason why it was OK to cheat,” she said. “And then I’d have been a cheat and a liar. Why would I do that to myself?”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Ex-superintendent gets 3.5 years for test scheme

October 9, 2012 by

Lorenzo Garcia, former superintendent in El Paso, has been sentenced to sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for fraud for manipulating test scores to collect $56,000 in bonuses and misleading the school board to steer a $450,000 no-bid contract to  his mistress.

Garcia, who was hired in 2006, worked with administrators to pre-test 10th graders and assign low scorers to ninth or 11th grade, so their scores wouldn’t be counted in the critical 10th-grade year. After repeating ninth grade, students were moved to 11th grade. Older students were told to drop out and get a GED.

In some cases, when the district needed to improve its graduation rate, it gave students credit for computer-based classes or “turbo-mesters,” which were 90-minute sessions in which students earned a full semester worth of credits.

“One girl got two semesters in three hours, in the last day of school, while her teacher was collecting books,” said former principal Stephen Lane, one of five people allowed to testify before Briones sentenced Garcia.

When Lane protested Garcia’s methods, he was fired and escorted out of the building by police.

High school test scores rose and El Paso’s rating improved from “academically acceptable” in 2005 to “recognized” in 2010. Then someone noticed all those missing 10th graders.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , , ,
«Older Posts