History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
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Cheating on tests and other dumb ideas
- 07-26-2011
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Opinion by Gregory J. Cizek/Education Week
Gregory J. Cizek is a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
It was a simpler time when the biggest worry schools had was whether students were peeking at crib notes. More sensational—and more worrisome—is the spate of recent reports about educator cheating on tests. Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., are among the districts facing scrutiny about the integrity of their test results. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that the problem is confined to schools with the misfortune of winding up in newspaper headlines. And, any superintendents or school officials who think cheating doesn’t exist on their turf has already demonstrated one symptom of the problem: denial. As an academic with a long-standing interest in the problem of cheating, I’ve had far too much experience with the issue (including assisting in the recent Atlanta investigations by, among other things, actually looking at hundreds of bubble sheets to verify a computer’s judgment that an erasure had occurred). The most common and persistent question I hear, “Why do educators cheat?” recalls the old joke about why people rob banks: It’s where the money is. (more...)
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