The Cheating Spreads

With all of the recent news about schools and teachers involved in assisting students to get better standardized tests scores by various forms of cheating, you would think that it would send a warning alarm to other districts to tighten up and assure it is not taking part. Yet we continue to hear of new investigations into new schools involved in cheating. Maybe all of them were doing so in the past, and are just now being investigated, but we're now hearing about it from both coasts, from New York, Georgia, and DC, to now hitting the other coast in California, so the epidemic may continue to spread.

At least two Los Angeles schools have been targeted as part of the investigation into the charges of cheating. Several teachers seem to be involved, and it has caused the state to toss out all of the test scores in two of the top scoring schools, and barring them from receiving an academic rating.

The two schools involved currently are Short Avenue Elementary in Del Rey and Animo Leadership Charter High School in Inglewood. The rankings they have lost is a figure that is what most use to measure their progress and parents used them to judge the specific campuses. The investigations have found that teachers have either been coaching the students on what the correct answer is, or they have actually been fixing the wrong answers once submitted.

The argument is made that there is so much pressure on the schools, the teachers, and the principals to show the students' achievements, and lower scores could mean bad evaluations, loss of funds, or job loss. It has become a survivalist mentality and these educators are doing what they feel they can to protect themselves.

One of the main ways cheating has been caught, is by noting the erasures on a test. If a single test has multiple erasures on it, and the majority of the changes are from wrong answers to correct answers, it sends off an alarm of potential test tampering. Some of the teachers involved would have 10-20 erasures on a single test, making it an easy target for suspicious activity to investigate. Some students interviewed have "admitted that they went back the next day and changed their incorrect answer to the correct one as a result of the previous day's review." Aside from reviews and erasures, some teachers have been found to have walked through the classroom, pointing out correct answers, or pointing to wrong answers and instructing the students to check it again, alerting them that their answer was indeed incorrect.

This new scandal will provoke a deeper examination into past years scores, to see if previous achievement awards are valid.

As someone in the education industry, please share your thoughts on this whole cheating scenario and how you feel about the topic.

Jeff McCormack resides in Virginia Beach, VA. where he works as a web designer by day. In his off time he is a husband, father, mail order book store manager, and musician. Aside from being a freelance writer for this Education Jobsite blog, he also seeks to assist in career choices and information by contributing to other Nexxt blog sites.