Another widely reported case involved a principal in Potomac, Maryland, who stepped down amidst charges that she had gone through students’ test booklets in the classroom and called them up to change or elaborate on their answers. News & World Report article described a case in Ohio, where one educator is accused of physically moving a student’s pencil-holding hand to the correct answer on a multiple-choice question. For instance, a colleague of mine tells of a principal who would begin each morning’s announcements with a greeting to students, such as, “Good morning students, and salutations! Do you know what a salutation is? It means ‘greeting,’ like the greeting you see at the beginning of a letter.” Students learned the meaning of words like “salutation” from the principal’s daily announcements they probably never learned that his choice of words like “salutation” was done with the vocabulary section of the state-mandated, norm-referenced test in hand. In short, the problem of cheating has spread from the examinees to the examiners.Ĭheating by educators comes in many forms, ranging from the subtle coaching of students to the overt manipulation of test results. But the increasing use of tests to assess the performance of not just students but also teachers, principals, schools, and the education system as a whole has engendered a growing trend: that of educators themselves attempting to subvert accountability systems by artificially inflating student test scores. Thus efforts to ensure test security and the reliability of results focused mainly on detecting and preventing cheating by students. Until recently, the phenomenon of cheating had been limited mainly to test takers. On the fabric, examinees would meticulously inscribe 722 essay responses to likely exam questions. Consider the so-called cribbing garment, an undergarment that was worn by examinees during the administration of civil-service examinations in China more than 1,000 years ago. For as long as there have been tests, there has been cheating.
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