Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores

Re:Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores by Natsu on Friday June 11, 2010 @05:33AM (#1423315)

This is one place where cheaters can really ruin a system. Once cheaters invade, they can hurt everyone by raising expectations of what can be done. Worse, too often, the natural tendency is to raise the standards if some cheating is uncovered.

If you raise your standards high enough, those who were formerly honest will be forced into cheating while those who remain honest are forced out. If you raise standards high enough, you end up with only cheaters, because past some threshold, it's no longer possible to meet expectations honestly.

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Re:Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores by ktsmith on Saturday June 12, 2010 @02:32AM (#1425655)

You don't need cheaters to reach a point where the expectations are so high they are unattainable. If you read the growth measures listed on the government education sites you'll see that states have proposed plans with ridiculous claims such as having ALL students passing their exams by 2014. While there are modified calculations for special education students this is still almost certainly unachievable in reality.

A perfect example would be the high school that I attended. This is a school in a small community (40k people when I attended, maybe 60k now) with a significant amount of wealth. The high school specifically has received massive amounts of donations for both academics and sports. Since the inception of NCLB the school has routinely made AYP however in 2008-2009 the school did not. The reason the school didn't is entirely due to students receiving "Individualized Education Plans" (IEP). With the mainstreaming of special needs and special education students this means that an entire school is being placed on the needs improvement list due to a small subset of the population receiving special education services.

I fully expect that in the next three to five years the vast majority of schools that have routinely made AYP will no longer be able to show adequate growth. When the children of upper middle class families start attending "failing" schools you'll start to hear a lot of complaints about NCLB.

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Re:Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores by tokenadult on Friday June 11, 2010 @08:47AM (#1423640)

If you raise standards high enough, you end up with only cheaters, because past some threshold, it's no longer possible to meet expectations honestly.

Evidence for this empirical statement?

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Re:Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores by Natsu on Friday June 11, 2010 @03:18PM (#1424397)

I'm not claiming that it is what's happening in teaching right now, mind you. I'm just claiming that it's certainly possible. I've certainly seen the idea happen elsewhere (it's how I came to realize that).

I will say that the statement relies on the assumption that honest folks cannot get a perfect score consistently. Although, even then, if one person always gets a perfect and the other person goofs up rarely and the business has to lay one of the two off, guess what usually happens?

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Re:Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores by jerf on Friday June 11, 2010 @01:37PM (#1424053)

That statement as written is trivially true. The question is whether it is what is occurring, which isn't going to be possible to ascertain. I don't think anyone really has a firm grasp on what it is possible for an average child to learn, which would be a prerequisite to answering the question.

(There is some idea what an average child can learn in our current system but that's such a small part of the possible state space of educational systems I don't pay much attention to it.)

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Re:Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores by tokenadult on Friday June 11, 2010 @02:55PM (#1424318)

Yes, I was referring to the space of actual school systems around the world, and standards they would ever be likely to adopt.

For good information about what is possible for young learners around the world, see

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/

and

http://timss.bc.edu/

For thoughts on how to improve teaching in United States schools, see (among many other sources)

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://mit.edu/6.969/www/readings/ma-review.pdf

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Re:Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores by kwantam on Friday June 11, 2010 @02:02PM (#1424140)

This is similar to the argument against allowing steroid use in various professional sports. If you can't compete unless you compete dishonestly (I'm not taking a side here on the question of whether steroids are actually bad, but if they're banned then their use is certainly cheating), eventually everyone cheats.

The obvious difference is that in the case of steroids in sports, it's an arbitrary system designed primarily to entertain people and make money; the outcomes are completely irrelevant to the success of the enterprise as such. In the case of child education, if everyone cheats, no one learns, and we've just raised a generation of dishonest, ignorant children.

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