Staff cheating on standardized tests? I’m shocked! Shocked!

by David Safier

Big standardized testing scandal in Georgia. About 200 of the state's 1800 schools are being investigated for tampering with state standardized tests.

Experts said it could become one of the largest cheating scandals in the era of widespread standardized testing.

The problems were initially uncovered in an investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, yet another piece of evidence that investigative journalism is still alive — though not necessarily well — in the U.S. When a school goes from the bottom in test scores to near the top, that deserves looking into. That kind of thing was happening regularly in Georgia schools.

It's interesting how the state determined where cheating might have occurred. It checked the average number of erasures on the answer sheets and how often those answers went from wrong to right. Lots of erasures that result in a boost in scores are a red flag.

And no, I'm not surprised. When teachers and schools are in a standardized testing pressure cooker and so much hangs on student scores, some people are going to cheat. Teachers and administrators are just as human, and just as flawed, as everyone else. What could be easier than erasing some wrong answers and bubbling in the right ones? Who's to know?

Of course, there are lots of even less detectable ways to cheat. When I was teaching, I picked up my test booklets a few days before testing day. All I had to do was open them up, find a dozen questions my students might not know the answer to, and literally "teach to the test" on the days before I gave it. I never did it, but it would have been easy, and undetectable.

Then there's the Texas trick — well documented — of holding weak students in 9th grade for 2 years so they don't take the all important 10th grade test, then skipping them on to the 11th grade. Or encouraging students to drop out, or transfer, before the 10th grade, another widespread Texas tactic. Or, as in Florida's case, holding back the worst readers in the 3rd grade so they take the test a year later, which will always give them higher scores. (To be fair, it's possible the retention was good for the students, but there's no question it was good for PR, since it automatically boosted scores. And man, has Florida Ladner made hay with those scores!)

How prevalent is the erasure problem nationwide? We don't know, because most states don't check (Apparently checking is fairly easy: just increase the sensitivity of the test scanners to detect smudges as well as dark markings). And so far as I know, investigative journalists in other states haven't followed the Journal-Constitution's lead and done an analysis of large changes in schools' scores from year to year.

It might be a good project for a journalism school, like the Walter Cronkite School at ASU that does quite a bit of serious, professional-quality journalism.