Standardized Testing and Teacher Cheating

While a few standardized tests over a student’s school career can be helpful to make sure students are on track and teachers are educating their students, the United States education system has far too many standardized tests. The U.S should reduce the number of tests given to students each year. The current amount of testing stresses students and forces teachers to “teach to the test”. Standardized testing has not and will not improve the American school

Cheating can be a common routine in a classroom—from copying work on homework to copying answers on a test. “Cheating by teachers and administrators on standardized tests is rare, and not a reason to stop testing America's children” (Standardized Tests). This statement is proved false by the fact that thirty-seven states have been caught cheating by

The first part of the chapter is about teachers that cheat, and the incentives that they have to cheat. In 1996, Chicago Public Schools started to require their schools to administer high-stakes testing every school year. A school with really low test scores would face

Cizek, Gregory J. "More Unintended Consequences of High-Stakes Testing." Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 20.4 (2005): 19-27. Google Scholar. Web. 8 Mar. 2017. This source explores the negative critiques of standardized testing from within the education profession. The history of high stakes tests is described to provide background information on how testing practices have evolved. Various consequences addressed include: reduction of instruction time, neglect of teaching material not covered by the tests, instruction and assessment mirroring the tests, and negative effects on teacher morale and creativity. Cizek also takes time to address the time commitment of test taking. While multiple hours spent on one test is necessary in

One of the most substantial and consequential reforms in education has been the nationwide adoption of standards-based accountability policies that use high-stakes standardized tests to evaluate the progress of students, the ability of teachers, and the effectiveness of schools {Dee:2011cl, Jacob:2005bm, Cohen:2009wl}. Since their inception in the late 1990s, high-stakes tests have been subject to much controversy. Researchers have uncovered various efforts by schools and districts to “game the system,” including discouraging low-performing students from taking the test {Heilig:2008hb}, targeting resources and attention to students near proficiency cutoffs {BooherJennings:2005bz, Neal:2010ut}, narrowing curricula to tested subjects {Au:2007ja, Koretz:2009ta}, even increasing students’ caloric intake on test days {Figlio:2005bp} and out-and-out cheating {Jacob:2003cd}. Moreover, teachers and administrators have criticized the policy, echoing concerns over a lack of resources, narrowed

Several different standardized tests are in use, but the nerve-wracking achievement tests have caused the most controversy. However, the assessments carry devastating penalties for schools with low scores, including teacher firings, and school closures. One 2006-07 study of an urban school district in the western U.S. researched the effects of closing a high school for low performance. A choice of attending another school within the district was an option. The other was to exit the district through other means like a charter school, to students of those schools.. Of 558 students, 175 exited the district by leaving, while 380 went to 17 different schools. All 380 had suffered appalling test scores. Conditions like this could encourage teachers to cheat the system for their own gain. Correspondingly, those scores prevent progression to the next grade. However, the tests are neither fair nor objective, because of their excessive

The biggest debate in education right now is whether or not standardized testing is beneficial or harmful to the educational needs of students. Teachers today feel that standardized testing has become excessive and is impeding the learning process of today’s students. However, legislators feel that standardized testing is imperative to the assessment of the achievement gap. Research suggests that excessive standardized testing is negatively impacting schools because of its emphasis on accountability and not on learning achievement, the ramifications it’s having on teachers, and the added stress and pressure it has placed on students.

However, it seems that all money being poured into this specific industry is a waste, because there is no method to determining whether the child has a genuine understanding of what he or she is being tested on, or if his or her knowledge is enhanced by a form of cheating. In March of 2013, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing issued a report claiming that 37 states nationwide were noted to be cheating on standardized tests. The cheating not only comes from students who feel pressured to excel academically, but also from teachers who want to reap the benefits of their students who perform well on the tests. The added bonus that teachers receive encourages them to help students achieve a certain grade on the standardized tests. In 2015, a major standardized cheating scandal came to light when an Atlanta jury convicted 11 teachers of helping students cheat on their tests. Through this specific example, it is evident that the scores of standardized tests are often enhanced, making them pointless when using them to help decipher a child's

I found De-testing and de-grading schools: Authentic alternatives to accountability and standardization by Bower and Thomas, an interesting read and consistent with the critiques of high stakes testing and assessment we’ve read about and watched in this class. It is a collection of essays from educators and stakeholders in the field. The book is broken up into distinct sections, the first focused on testing and the second on grading. A historical context regarding failures of testing and grading is also provided to give context to the current problems with high stakes assessment and grading. The main message presented in this book is that high stakes testing and assessments (grading) are not working and alternatives should be considered. Specifically, the law of No Child Left Behind is critiqued through out, especially in the first few chapters.

The NCLB’s testing policy has led to unethical behaviors from school administrators and teachers. One form of the behavior is cheating on standardized tests. “School administrators [are] erasing incorrect responses on students’ answer sheets and substituting correct answers; teachers [are ]allowing more time than test instructions require; [and ]teachers [are] supplying students with hints about which answers are correct; and test preparation sessions using test items” (Spring, 2010. 233). To give an example of eroding teacher professionalism, look at the recent cheating scandals in Georgia and Southern California. Because states reward their schools and teachers when their students score well on standardized tests, teachers in multiple states are being forced to alter test answers in order to keep their job or to receive a better bonus in their salary.

The increase of standardization in education in the years following the NCLB’s implementation brought more undesirable consequences, one of them being the pressure placed on teachers to perform well. More now than ever, teachers are accountable for the test scores and performances given by individual students (Wiliam, Dylan). In fact, the main purpose of standardized testing is not to assess the contextual knowledge of students, but rather to act as an assessment of teacher performance and quality. Teachers are held more accountable for the scores of their students than the students themselves are, despite the proven lack of control that teachers have over test scores. This particular facet of the American education system sets us apart other developing countries, where students are held as equally accountable to their scores as teachers are. According to Dylan Wiliam, two-thirds of the reasoning behind test scores can be traced back to socioeconomic factors, further showing that teachers have a small influence in a student’s test score, and that they should not be assessed based on them alone.

Another problem seen today with standardized testing is teachers being evaluated based on how their students score. When looking at student test scores, if scores are not up to par, the district will occasionally make cuts in the mindset that the educator did not prepare their students enough for the standardized test, but it has been found that "student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions" (Baker 2010). This has been decided because the standardized test scores are going to fluctuate from year to year, an educator that could be at the top of the effective educator list one year could be at the bottom of the list the following year. It has

The experiences of educators and students at Tyler Heights Elementary School, as described in the book Tested, point to the unintended side effects of high stakes testing. One of the side effects is that standardized testing has gained national attention for score inflation. That is, the student scores on the standardized high stakes tests are higher than what would be expected, particularly given the base from which the students began. A phenomenon called the Campbell Law of social science illustrates how praxis comes to be influenced by testing, as follows: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to maintain" (Campbell, 1975).

When implemented and data gathered correctly, in the best circumstance, standardized tests can reflect the teacher’s ability to teach. Their knowledge and ability to relate said knowledge can be effectively measured, by the scores of their students. As written by Grant Wiggins, about the proper use of standardized test, “reform of testing depends, however, on teachers’ recognizing that standardized testing evolved and proliferated because the school transcript became untrustworthy,“ (Wiggins 354). In this Wiggins describes how the modern tests developed because of a lack of trust. Teacher dishonestly turned in altered grades, for students, to fake successful teaching and learning. Because of this, these tests depict the students’ true knowledge learned. Another factor that promotes standardized test, is, as written by Wiggins “rather than seeing tests as after-the-fact devices for checking up on what students have learned, we should see them as instructional,” (Wiggins 354). By this Wiggins suggests that such

In recent years, the test scores of school age kids in this country have fallen. The response to this problem has been, extreme. A test is something that measures how much of the subject the student understands. Individual scores gives the teacher a general idea of what a student is grasping and what they might need help with. Classroom averages may give the teacher an idea of how to adjust their teaching technique. The scores are representative of the student’s progress, they are not the end goal of learning. Yet high stakes testing makes a test