Teachers caught cheating on standardized testing

[CaptainChewbacca]

USA Today

From 2008 to 2010, 103 public schools in the District of Columbia were flagged for having at least one class of students with statistically high rates of wrong answers that were erased and replaced by correct answers on their standardized tests. That represents more than half of the schools in the system.

Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB McGraw-Hill, D.C.'s testing company, uses to score the tests.

Test-takers pencil in a circle or a bubble on the answer sheet. When an answer is erased, a smudge is left behind, and machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student and the total number of changed answers for an entire classroom.

A trio of academicians consulted by USA TODAY say such erasure rates are so statistically rare and yet show up in so many classrooms that they should be thoroughly examined.

The site has charts of the irregularities. This story has been a massive bombshell in education, I know the teachers in the lounge today were talking about it. Michelle Rhee and the DC schools has been rubbed in the face of teachers ever since it happened. The sentiment has been 'See? You can improve you just aren't trying hard enough!' I guess it didn't occur to people that if you offer a person a bonus equivalent to 20% of their annual salary ($10k for principals, $8k for teachers), they might take extraordinary measures to get it. Hopefully this will make people more careful before they rush to corporate or incentive-based education and make sure things are done correctly.

If you pay the teacher per-A, I guarantee you'll have a highschool full of valedictorians.

[White Haven]

Sadly, of course, this will only bring up a national discussion on how to better implement massed standardized testing, rather than whether it's even worth it at all.

[Crossroads Inc.]

My Mom, a life long special Ed teacher, predicted this sort of stuff almost a Decade ago when here school started to more aggressively push "goal oriented results" IE, higher pay based only on grades.

This is bound to happen and anyone surprised by it is kidding themselves about just what sort of pressure US teachers are under these days. I know it sounds wishy washy, but the whole grading concept as it is now is really a very poor way of evaluating how well kids learn. Personally I take it as to what is fundamentally wrong with the US education system. That most places don't care about what or how kids learn, but only how well a school 'appears' to be doing.

""Congratulations! Everyone in your school got an A, what is your secret?"
"Easy! All they had to do was write their name to pass the final exame!"

[CaptainChewbacca]

We're actually doing standardized testing today, and its already fucked up. Each test part is 75 minutes, but students are told that if they don't finish, they're to be given extra time to complete the section when its done.

Guess what; There's nowhere for them to go, no time built in for them to make up the work, and no plan for how to do that. I have 35 9th graders who thought they would get extra time, so about a third of them didn't finish the english section of the test. If they get low scores, does that mean their english teacher is a failure? Will there be a notation on their grades of (*We fucked these kids over)? They spent three hours testing today with improper and inadequate instruction, and we can't afford a 2nd day to fix it.

[Faqa]

Here's the thing - if not standardized testing, then what? I'm sure all professionals in a field would like to just be turned loose on their jobs and have other professionals be the subjective judges of whether or not they're doing a good job. As a coder, that sounds awesome. But the people with the money(elected officials and by extension taxpayers) have this silly idea that they should have enough information to make decisions rather than just handing over said money. How do they get this information? How do even decide who's doing a good job as opposed to a bad one? How do they even judge what "good" or "bad" is in this context? Higher test scores? Happier students? Anything I can think of can and has been gamed.

It's possible teaching is simply one of those jobs where you have no choice but to turn a professional loose and take his word for how he's doing.

[Jaepheth]

Would there be a way to use standardized test grades as a metric, but setup the reward system to balance interests?

Example:
school boards have their funding increased if failure rates are high
teachers have their salaries increased if passing rates are high
A committee of teachers and administrators create the exams (or create a state or national standard exam)
a third, neutral party (e.g. Prometric testing centers), proctors the exam.

[RedImperator]

Nothing like a big fucking brontosaurus egg on the face of Michelle Rhee to make my day.

[Illuminatus Primus]

All about what Red said. Fuck her. She's helping advise the imbecile destroying education in my State.

[mr friendly guy]

The book Freakonomics mentions this and how they managed to suspect teachers of giving their students a helping hand. I can't remember the exact details, but I am sure wiki will have a summary. It might be interesting reading for those who want to know more.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The book Freakonomics mentions this and how they managed to suspect teachers of giving their students a helping hand. I can't remember the exact details, but I am sure wiki will have a summary. It might be interesting reading for those who want to know more.

It was the same sort of thing, with teachers erasing and getting caught by comparing strings of answers at the end of tests (which is where students usually start flagging). Teachers would step in and change/correct the last 15 or 20 answers.

Another way to spot cheating is multi-year tracking. For example, if in 4th grade Jimmy was reading below grade level, and then on the 5th grade test he's suddenly made rapid improvements, that's great! But, if then on the 6th grade test Jimmy is back to below grade-level, you can bet that 5th grade teacher gave him a helping hand.

Its not just teachers, some SCHOOLS make grade inflation a policy. If (in the case of Miss Rhee-tard) you promise to FIRE teachers who don't improve, you'll find people are very devoted to keeping their jobs, and suddenly your school is full of supposed Edward James Olmoses and Robins William.

[Knife]

This is the end result of a profit motive in education.

[Mayabird]

Maybe this is new news for DC, but it's been known over a year that georgia has had rampant cheating on standardized tests, and probably other states as well (I have a well-known grudge against georgia, after all).

[Darth Yan]

as someone who recently completed my sats i find this rather distressing. Still, teachers cheating for students isn't unheard of (coaches in universities go out of their way to buy test answers for their star players.) It's essentially the same effect in both cases: short term benefit for the teacher/school, but retardation of the student's academic growth in the long term.

[defanatic]

Couldn't you have some sort of state run standardised testing that is separate from the teachers? We have that here.

[bobalot]

The problem is teachers will start teaching students to simply pass these tests rather than imparting them with actual knowledge.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Exactly. I could take three weeks out of my year just to teach Billy & Susie how to maximize their guessing abilities to bring up their test scores 6%, but thats time that could be better spent teaching them things like continental drift and the scientific method.

[Serafina]

Exactly. I could take three weeks out of my year just to teach Billy & Susie how to maximize their guessing abilities to bring up their test scores 6%, but thats time that could be better spent teaching them things like continental drift and the scientific method.

How does guessing play into this?

Germany uses state-run standardized test for our final exams: A teachers commission is preparing a test each year, which will be used in all schools in a state.
This simply means that all students in that state will have to pass the same math/biology/history/physics/etc.-tests. It doesn't mean that those tests are pick&choose - they still have to calculate a page-long answer to a math problem or write a three-site answer to a geology problem. It just means that every student in the state will have to answer the same problem.

[Simon_Jester]

Most American standardized tests include a large number of simple multiple-choice questions. Being more sophisticated about how you guess answers to those questions when you don't know can significantly increase your chances of getting the right answers to those questions. Just knowing what to look for in terms of "dumb answers I can reject" to limit the set of possible choices can matter a lot- there's a big difference between a student who guesses between A, B, C, and D and one who guesses between A and C in terms of final score.

That can have a big effect even if your actual knowledge of the subject matter didn't change.

Essay problems* don't fall prey to the same thing, but the American drive towards standardized testing has tended to leave such things by the waysides.

*This includes page-long math problems and other tasks that require extended work and analysis rather than rapid processing of a large number of easy problems.

[defanatic]

The problem is teachers will start teaching students to simply pass these tests rather than imparting them with actual knowledge.

They don't see the test, and the requirements for the test are generalised (e.g. they need to be able to apply some of these equations, write about this whatever, rather than a specific set of questions that only have numbers or key figures changed), so that everything you want taught should get taught. Certainly better than teachers actively changing their students' answers.

[Serafina]

Most American standardized tests include a large number of simple multiple-choice questions. Being more sophisticated about how you guess answers to those questions when you don't know can significantly increase your chances of getting the right answers to those questions. Just knowing what to look for in terms of "dumb answers I can reject" to limit the set of possible choices can matter a lot- there's a big difference between a student who guesses between A, B, C, and D and one who guesses between A and C in terms of final score.

That can have a big effect even if your actual knowledge of the subject matter didn't change.

Essay problems* don't fall prey to the same thing, but the American drive towards standardized testing has tended to leave such things by the waysides.

*This includes page-long math problems and other tasks that require extended work and analysis rather than rapid processing of a large number of easy problems.

I know (or rather heavily suspected from context) that, and i'm well aware of the problems of multiple-choice tests, but i see no reason why that system should not be changed. Multiple-choice tests are simply bad for testing actual knowledge rather than testing-skills. They are certainly easier to grade and will allow for less bias during grading, but that's about the only advantage i can see. And in many fields (e.g. math or sciences) there isn't that much room for grading bias anyway, because there is only one correct answer.

The only multiple-choice tests i ever came across during my education were in low-difficulty classes * and in non-graded competitions. For everything else, i had to think of the answer myself.

* We have three sets of schools with three levels of difficulty, and i switched from the highest to the second-highest during my education. I had my first graded MC-tests there, all tests before that were non-graded trial tests except for the ones in religious studies and ethics classes. **

** Yes we have those. In fact our constitution demands such classes for public (don't know about non-public) schools for every denomination that has an organization that can claim to represent it and asks for such classes (they hire the teachers and such, so if there is no organization there is no appropriate religious teacher). There is also an "ethics"-class for non-religious students.

[CaptainChewbacca]

They don't see the test, and the requirements for the test are generalised (e.g. they need to be able to apply some of these equations, write about this whatever, rather than a specific set of questions that only have numbers or key figures changed), so that everything you want taught should get taught. Certainly better than teachers actively changing their students' answers.

The problem is, there's more to the subject matter than what's on the test. I have to give more weight to things that are 'standards' than those that are not, even if they're both relevant. For example, Geologic time is NOT a standard. My students won't be tested on it at all, but its one of the foundational principles for organizing the formation and evolution of the earth. So either I spend time teaching something 'not required' or my students have an incomplete knowledge base.

[Simon_Jester]

I know (or rather heavily suspected from context) that, and i'm well aware of the problems of multiple-choice tests, but i see no reason why that system should not be changed. Multiple-choice tests are simply bad for testing actual knowledge rather than testing-skills. They are certainly easier to grade and will allow for less bias during grading, but that's about the only advantage i can see.

[nods wearily]

No kidding, Serafina. No kidding. American standardized testing is very much industrialized; I've heard people arguing that the entire American school system is industrialized- built on the factory production model, where speed and ease of 'production' tend to override quality concerns.

Not in the minds of the teachers, but the way the school's administered the teachers keep getting treated like assembly line workers- for which purpose the standardized multiple choice tests become a common metric of their performance.

[Serafina]

The problem is, there's more to the subject matter than what's on the test. I have to give more weight to things that are 'standards' than those that are not, even if they're both relevant. For example, Geologic time is NOT a standard. My students won't be tested on it at all, but its one of the foundational principles for organizing the formation and evolution of the earth. So either I spend time teaching something 'not required' or my students have an incomplete knowledge base.

The obvious solution is to make sure that necessary knowledge will be tested.
Just testing ONE random aspect of a field each year is obviously the wrong approach, because students will either
-learn just one aspect if they know which one is relevant
-learn all of them and get worse grades than they deserve, because they are not ultra-familiar with one
-learn a few random ones and hope that they hit the right one, passing based on their skill/luck to pick the right ones

Obviously, this will require extensive tests. And such an approach would not be perfect, you can always miss something important, but at least you're trying. Test-requirements should simply match real requirements as much as possible, at the expense of more extensive testing when necessary.


In Germany, graduation tests actually include low-level research work. For example, a friend of mine recently wrote a 30-page overview about transsexuality, and i've recently read a 39-page work about the seismic/volcanic history of Germany. This is in addition to other tests, but it ensures that the student is capable of applying the necessary aspects of a field to perform actual work in that field. If you don't understand a crucial aspect of geology, it will show in your work about geology.

[Simon_Jester]

Er, is this college or high school graduation? I'm not entirely sure which you mean.

[Serafina]

Er, is this college or high school graduation? I'm not entirely sure which you mean.

High school, or at least our equivalent to it.
Most states in Germany have four school systems:
One where you go for the first 4-5 years, and three others where you go afterwards. One goes up to the 9th year and is the worst of the three, the other goes up to the 10th year and the third goes up to the 12th year (you're about 18 when you finish) and is required for university studies. I was talking about the third one, where you're required to finish several such projects for graduation.