Cheating has always been part of the academic landscape. Until recently, however, it primarily involved individual students who brought crib sheets to class, wrote equations on the palm of their hand or copied large chunks of previously published works without attribution.
Tom Lehrer, singer, songwriter and satirist, as well as a college mathematics professor, lampooned this latter phenomenon in "Lobachevsky:" "Plagiarize/Let no one else's work evade your eyes/Remember why the good Lord made your eyes/So don't shade your eyes/But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize/Only be sure always to call it please research."
But cheating has escalated from individual to institutional acts of violence against the integrity of standardized testing. Cheating scandals have enveloped Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., as well as a number of other smaller school districts. These may be just the tip of the iceberg.
That this should occur probably should not come as a surprise and demonstrates how easily and frequently test integrity is violated.
No Child Left Behind has attached severe consequences to those schools and districts that fail to meet proficiency goals in reading, mathematics and science. The consequences range in seriousness from replacing principals and faculty to transforming the school to a charter or shuttering the school and allowing its students to attend other schools.
Moreover, there has been a concerted effort on behalf of the secretary of education as well as many state departments of education to evaluate teachers based on the results of their students on standardized tests. Teachers may fail to receive bonuses or even be dismissed if their students fail to meet established standards.
Campbell's Law enunciated in 1976 captured the corrupting influence of high stake tests: "When test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways."
Similarly a study by the Educational Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University concluded, "The over-reliance on high-stakes testing has serious negative consequences that are present at every level of the public school system."
The focus to date of the cheating scandals has been erasing errors and filling in correct test scores, but there are a myriad of other methods used to cheat on standardized tests. Fair Test, National Center for Fair & Open Testing observed that educators may adjust scores and test difficulty to create a false picture of progress, manipulate the pool of tested students for optimal results or utilize more subtle ways of cheating such as hinting at the right answers as students take tests or leave material on the walls of the classroom that may help students figure out questions.
Some districts have obtained copies of the test in advance and drill students on slightly altered questions.
One result of the cheating scandals has been a reduction in confidence in test scores in particular and in the public education system in general. Think major league baseball and steroids. Fans became increasingly skeptical of the results of those widely suspected of using steroids but also began to question any performance that was out of the ordinary. Inevitably, as the rumors spread and names were named fans began to lose faith and questioned the integrity of the game.
Schools that legitimately boost test results through outstanding teaching or the hard work of students nevertheless may be tarred with the same brush as those suspected of cheating.
The most serious consequence of these scandals, however, is not the gaming of the system, but the fact that it is the students who ultimately suffer.
If used legitimately and analyzed properly, standardized test results can identify a school's strengths and weaknesses so that it can make decisions about where to apply its resources, where instruction needs to be focused or improved or in what way the curriculum should be altered. Cheating obviously distorts that decision-making process.
Moreover, students are deprived of an accurate accounting of their individual strengths and weaknesses giving an inflated impression of their academic ability. Teachers are deprived of the analytic tools necessary to identify students' specific needs and to design curriculum and instruction to meet those needs.
Fair Test argued, "The high-stakes use of standardized testing must end because it cheats students out of a high quality education and cheats the public out of accurate information about public school quality."
However if high-stakes test are to remain the preferred method in this country of evaluating student achievement, we must improve test security in such a way that it will restore public confidence in the test results without damaging school climate and alienating students and their teachers.
Louis M. Shucker is an attorney in private practice. He graduated from Temple University Law School and is a member of the Schuylkill Valley School Board.