In the era where poor scores mean punishment for the school, there appears to be a new form of cheating: the teachers or administrators changing the answers after the exam has been completed.
Georgia Schools Inquiry Finds Signs of Cheating
The erasure analysis used the same scanners that score tests to count the erasures in which answers were changed from wrong to right. “It’s not any sort of crazy technology,” Ms. Mathers said. “You just beef up the scanner so it can read varying degrees of gray scale.”
The study determined the average number of wrong-to-right erasures statewide for each grade and subject, and flagged any classroom with an unusually high number. For example, in fourth-grade math, students on average changed 1.8 answers from wrong to right, while one classroom that was flagged as suspicious had more than 6 such changes per student.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has its 700,000 students come in at an honest 30% “No Child Left Behind” tested competence for reading and math. The teachers aren’t smart enough to get the right answers to chill the deck. “High School” in the LAUSD is graduating within six years of admission. Fully 40% of the input makes it through (including automatic diplomas for the learning other-abled.) An 80 IQ is enough for anybody.
Next year’s Los Angeles city budget projects to be $480 million in the red, Officially pronounced on TV as “almost a million dollars a day.” Perhaps they left out weekends and holidays.