GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Our students have developed a language of whistling, which I find pretty interesting. A kid will get a bathroom pass from anywhere in the school, then walk down hallways whistling. A certain whistle means “Get a bathroom pass” and another whistle means “text me.” I’m not being sarcastic when I say it’s kind of brilliant. Took me two whole weeks to figure it out.

In junior high, we used to wear bangle bracelets and shake them to give and get answers all over the room. I tell the kids, I’m old so anything they can think of doing, I have already done. Several years ago, i proctored a hsitory regents and had an argument with the AP about letting kids share electronic dictionaries–she didn’t have a problem with it–and this was before merit pay was even an idea.

Wow, who knew that cheating had gotten so sophisticated? With my middle schoolers, they haven’t thought beyond copying the person next to them, which doesn’t happen often and I can usually figure out when they do it. And I have to say, usually their performance on tests is pretty consistent with their performances with classwork and HW. I’ve found that the kids who don’t care enough to do the work, or do it well, don’t care enough to put the effort into cheating.

The easiest way to eliminate nearly all cheating is not to give exams with multiple choice answers, no matter what the subject area. In seven years of HS math teaching, I NEVER ONCE gave a test with multiple choice answers. NOT ONCE! I also used the alternating test strategy extensively — two versions, A and B, distributed alternately. The biggest thing, though, is avoiding multiple choice. Just as no two essays can or should be alike, no two students EVER do a math problem the same way (I always required students to show work and insisted that a correct answer, by itself, would only earn them one or two points, at most, out of (say) ten). Surprisingly, students do math problems the same way they write essays or even two-sentence responses — each student had his/her own “signature” for how they solved problems, and they were more individually distinguishable than you would think. Copying was trivially easy to pick up on and rarely happened in my class exams. The Regents Math exams, on the other hand, pose many of the same challenges you’ve enumerated here. Bottom line, even though it’s a lot more work to do the grading, is get rid of the multiple choice questions.

mathman,

You have a point, of course. And for math, I absolutely agree with you. Of course, standardized tests are different, and rely on mc. I suppose if kids can pass your real tests they can get through mc questions, so excluding them is a good idea. I think, though, that things like the water bottle could help kids in subjects other than math, where they may be asked to regurgitate info rather than understand a process.

NB,

I try to give a variety of activities on a test. I’m comfortable giving maybe 20% to mc, but what I teach requires an understanding of how English works, so even if poor students get that 20% by cheating, the rest of the test will be Greek to them. Of course some of my students actually know Greek, so therein lies yet another issue.

CHEATING IS ENDEMIC AT ALL LEVELS OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM.  AND OUR SOCIETY.  SEE THE BOOK FREAKONOMICS.  SEE THE MOVIE SERPICO.  READ THE NY TIMES ABOUT ENRON, ACCOUNTING FIRMS FOR CORPORATIONS, GOLDMAN SACHS, MOODY’S RATING SYSTEM, AIG, VIETNAM BODY COUNTS BY THE MILITARY, MANIPULATION OF REGENT’S EXAMS BY COMPANIES HIRED TO WRITE REGENTS ( SO THAT NYS COULD SHOW AYP TO GET FUNDS FROM NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND)  WHY SHOULD YOU EXPECT THAT STUDENTS, TEACHERS, ADMINISTRATORS, SHOULD BE MORE HONEST THAN THE LEADERS OF SOCIETY WHO ALSO GAME THE SYSTEM.

DID YOU EVER THINK THAT THE SAME APPROACH IS PREVALENT IN LAWSCHOOL, AND (GASP) MEDICAL SCHOOL AND RESIDENCY PROGRAMS? MY MODEST PROPOSAL IS TO ALLOW A TEACHER OF ENGLISH TO BE IN CHARGE OF HARVARD LAW, OR A SURGERY RESIDENCY PROGRAM, OR THE FBI. THAT WOULD REALLY GET THE JOINT JUMPING. THE TRADITIONS OF OMMERTA EXTEND FAR BEYOND THE MAFIA.

I agree with you if I had the luxury of having 27 students sit in separate seats. I don’t have individual desks. My room has 9 regular tables where 3 or 4 students sit together for class work, group activities, and pair share within that table group. Hence, the folders to hide their exams.

During Regents week, every classroom sit two at a table, room capacity 22 students, and folders are set-up to maintain the integrity of the Regents exams.

You bring up a very good point about the “success” of teachers being calculated by test scores, so it pays for them to allow cheating. What a sick world.

Merit pay does create an incentive for teachers to cheat so that their students score higher on standardized tests, but couldn’t that problem be solved by having the test proctored by a teacher whose pay is not tied student performance on that test? Completed exams could exchanged with a neighboring school and graded by someone with nothing to gain by cheating.

I am not making an argument for merit pay, but there are common sense ways to take teacher cheating out of the equation. Even without merit pay teachers are judged by their peers and their administration in part by their students’ performance on standardized exams. The incentive is their to cheat already and in my opinion much more needs to be done to limit how much a teacher can influence a test score from the moment the exam is distributed through the grading process.