'Credit recovery' relies on easy tests, lots of cheating
- Joanne Jacobs
- Aug 6, 2024
- 1 min read
"Credit recovery" boosts graduation rates by letting students who've failed a traditional course pass very easy tests on which it is very easy to cheat, concludes a new working paper, Failing to Learn from Failure: The Facade of Online Credit Recovery Assessments.
Instead of repeating a class or going to summer school, students can "navigate through computer modules, taking quizzes and assessments within these digital programs," writes Fordham's Adam Tyner.
Researchers looked at assessments for an online Algebra I course offered by a large credit-recovery vendors. "The results are both unsurprising and disheartening," writes Tyner. More than 90 percent of questions didn't require any analysis or evaluation; 83 percent were multiple choice.
The exams, taken online, are rarely proctored, the study noted. Students could answer 91 percent of questions with a simple Google search. Many questions are posted on numerous websites, writes Tyner.
If students fail, the process for retaking tests is "alarmingly lenient," he writes. Students "can review all their previous answers along with the correct ones before attempting the exam again, often with the questions in the exact same order."
State and district regulation of credit recovery programs is lax. Administrators have an incentive to pass students along, regardless of how little they've learned.
The study's authors suggest better tests, in-person proctoring and state-level auditing to see whether "the credits students receive reflect genuine learning and comprehension."
Once again, education comes down to either having higher standards with the accompanying higher failure rates or low standards with lower failure rates. Both the school choice proponents on the right or the stop testing on the left have the same goal, finding a way to not deal with the trade off of standards and failure rates.
The name, CREDIT recovery, tells you that actual learning is not the focus.
Cargo cult education. But then schooling is about getting good grades, not real learning. It's all about passing the test rather than developing real skills....these days even reading skills.
Remember in a bureaucracy, it is the statistics that determine reward, not the actual benefit to the human beings the bureaucracy uses as for their emotional appeal for funding.