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To Catch a Cheat
Maybe some day an enterprising journalist will expose the scandal of the rating system of "best" [sic]high schools which Newsweek publishes with such fanfare. Many educators consider it a cheat and a fraud when quite deplorable schools are named "best" when all they do is dump lots of unprepared kids into AP classes. In the Newsweek system, kids don't have to pass the AP test; they don't have even to take it. Just being a warm body in the class counts for excellence.
But the pressure is on for magazines to sell product. Some, it seems, are willing to resort to anything. And other journalists won't expose the system because in the good old boy system one journalist doesn't attack another.
And as for this article, just what "new transparency" is achieved through this wholesale testing, anyway?
Newsweek article subhead: The pressure is on for schools to raise test scores. Some, it seems, are willing to resort to anything.
By Peg Tyre
For a while it seemed as though Forest Brook High School in Houston was a shining example of school reform. In 2005, after years of rock-bottom test scores, results shot up: 95 percent of eleventh graders passed the state science test. Administrators praised the hard work of the teachers. The governor awarded the school a $165,000 grant. But that same year, the Texas Education Agency hired a company called Caveon Test Security to ensure that the state's standardized-test results were valid. Caveon—along with an investigative series by The Dallas Morning News—found a host of irregularities at Forest Brook. The state eventually cleared the school's administrators but made sure last year's testing was monitored by an outside agency. The scores at Forest Brook plunged Last year, only 39 percent passed science.
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It's a jarring but common story. While there have always been students who crib an answer or two, lately teachers, principals and school administrators are being snared for gaming—and sometimes outright cheating on—standardized tests. Under the six-year-old federal education-reform law No Child Left Behind, scores on statewide exams have become the single yardstick by which school success is measured. Struggling schools are being penalized—and some are even slated to be taken over if tests scores fail to rise. Teachers are under pressure to show that kids are learning more, and if they do that, even by fudging the results they can help their borderline school survive. Nowhere is that pressure more intense than Texas, the state that was the incubator for the federal law. In 2005, Caveon found that 700 public schools had suspicious test scores—and though all but a few schools were cleared, the state education commissioner resigned amid the controversy and new testing regulations were put in place.
All of which is providing an unexpected windfall for educational psychologist John Fremer, president of Caveon Test Security. His Utah-based company conducts what is called data forensics—computer analysis of test results—for elementary, middle and high schools. In the past two years, his tiny company has landed contracts in 11 states, including Texas, Florida and Massachusetts. "Right now," says Fremer, "there's a lot of concern about the fairness and validity of standardized tests."
Back in 2003, when Caveon was founded, no one was paying too much attention to testing in grades K through 12. Then, Caveon's focus was making sure testing for professional licenses, like massage therapist or food inspector, went smoothly. But as No Child Left Behind increased pressure on schools, Caveon's K-12 business took off.
Its method for catching cheaters is based on probability. Caveon computers analyze the fill-in-the-bubble-type multiple-choice answer sheets for patterns. If, say, 80 out of 100 kids get an answer correct on a math test, that probably means the teacher covered that material sufficiently. If, however, Caveon software detects that 50 kids out of 100 have a long string of identical wrong answers on a big chunk of a multiple-choice test, or a suspicious erasure pattern, Caveon recommends that authorities start asking teachers and principals some hard questions.
How much cheating is really going on? No one knows how much kids cheat on standardized tests, but according to a 2006 poll, 60 percent of high schoolers admitted to cheating on all kinds of tests in school the previous year, and 33 percent admitted to plagiarizing from the Internet. Who is most likely to cheat? Athletes, kids who aren't religious and kids who don't take AP courses. Unless kids get busted on the spot, assessment researchers say, student-led cheating usually involves only a kid or two and is hard to identify. Teacher-led cheating is less pervasive but easier to detect. Caveon estimates that about 1 to 2 percent of schools it's tested show a high probability of adult-led cheating—for example, teachers who give kids the actual exam to study from, write strings of answers on the blackboard or go through completed exams, replacing wrong answers with the right ones. Adult-led cheating tends to involve more kids and affect scores more widely. In the past year or so there have been adult-led cheating rings in schools in New York, New Jersey, California and Florida.
Cheating researcher Gregory Cizek, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says adult-led deception is inevitable. "Good teachers spend their days cajoling correct answers out of reluctant students," he says. "Some find it hard to remain impassive on test day." States need to make—and reinforce—strict testing procedures and punish those who don't follow them, he says. If not, the new transparency that schools get through testing may be clouded by scandal.
— Peg Tyre
Newsweek
2007-10-15
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