Real People Who Stop Real Cheating--Welcome the Invigilators!

by guest blogger Arwen E.

With the new emphasis on high-stakes testing, we need a new class of people.  I'm not talking about members of the Testing Industrial Complex, manufacturing exams, grading exams, selling exam-based textbooks for test prep and such.  I'm talking about the invigilators--the anti-cheating police (and no I did not make up that word). 
  
The higher the stakes, the more important it becomes to have highly, qualified invigilators.  They were so effective in Hubei Province in China that students rioted there, chanting, "We want fairness.  There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."  Skilled invigilators have been known to uncover cell phones in underwear and even transmitters in erasers!

As long as the tests are also high stakes for teachers, the invigilators will need to monitor teachers just as closely.  This may mean, in the most egregious situations, pat-downs and strip searches!

Since the work of invigilators is highly demanding, they need to be highly paid.  More resources must be funneled away from classrooms to pay these  elite invigilators with skills on par with the James Bonds of the past.

They may take some lessons from Kasetsart University in Thailand where students apparently all agreed that it was fun to wear cheaply fashioned blinders.

More lessons are to be learned from Thailand's Civil Aviation Center where boxes were all the rage. 

Tests must be given in dead zones, literally and figuratively, to prevent cheating via cellular devices.  There will be a need for companies to fashion sturdy, functional, reusable blinders.  Invigilators will always need to stay one step ahead of the potential cheater.  Giving credit where credit's due, namely at Blinders, Boxes and Beyond, how can they fail? 

Blended Learning

There's a piece in the New York Post that pretty much confirms everyone's worst suspicions about so-called blended learning. Actually, this particular brand does not appear to have been blended very well at all. In fact, it sounds like the very worst sort of credit recovery, and I only wish it were restricted to that which the story describes.

How many of us have seen or heard of kids getting on computers, answering a few questions, and somehow getting credit for courses they'd failed? You answer A, B, C or D, maybe get it wrong, and maybe answer again. Or maybe you sit with the book and look it up. More likely, you find a smart girlfriend to do it for you. Actually, if you're smart enough  to look up the information, you're probably smart enough to avoid taking the makeup computer thing anyway. Still, the story describes students paying other students 80 bucks to sit at the computer.

80 bucks seems like a lot of money for a high school kid to pay. What on earth is the kid learning by doing such a thing? Certainly nothing I want my kid to learn at school. I'm not a big fan of cheating. I discourage it actively in my class. Of course if my class were designed to restore credit in a multitude of subjects for no particular reason, I might have a different outlook. And of course, if I let kids take tests at home, on or off computer, it would be tough to imagine resulting grades as remotely reliable.

I've actually been at presentations where people introduced blended learning concepts that were interesting. But it's clear to me that the bottom-feeders at the DOE liked it because it enabled them to hire fewer teachers, never a good idea for kids in need of role models. It's even clearer to me that desperate administrators won't hesitate to use it to improve their stats.

When Mike Bloomberg places guns to the heads of principals and says he needs higher graduation rates, he places them in a tough spot. Public school principals can't go all charter school and dump the kids they deem likely to fail. In fact, once the charters shed those inconvenient children, the public school principals with guns at their heads not only have to take them, but also have to figure out how not to have them hurt their graduation rates.

So what do you do? Have the kids sit in front of the computer, award them credits, and it's a win-win!

Except for the kids, of course. What do they learn? They certainly don't learn whatever their original teachers had in mind. But they do learn that failure is no problem. If you fail, you just sit at a computer, or get someone else to do it, or pay someone else to do it, and whether or not you've learned anything is of no consequence whatsoever.

After all, college is full of papers, and there are a million places you can buy them. Sometimes those places put ads in the comments section and I zap them. I want kids in my class to really learn English, to be able to communicate, to be able to go out on the streets and get what they want and need. I want them to love the language and I want them to use it. The notion that passing some test on a computer could show me that is simply ridiculous.

Computers are a great tool. I love computers, and obviously I'm sitting at one right now. But people who think they take the place of teachers, people, or learning need to have their hard drives examined.

Walcott's First Draft

It's absurd to suggest that cheating is prevalent in New York City. Here in NY, we take test scores very seriously. In fact, we close schools and dismiss principals based solely on test results. So what possible motivation would anyone in the system have to cheat? We encourage all episodes of cheating to be reported fully, and I've invited anyone who knows of any cheating to contact me personally. What more can people ask?

As for this nonsense about expensive erasure analysis, it's important to note we have limited funds. In these tough times, we need to pick and choose how we spend our money. Since we already know we have little or no cheating, why would we want to spend money testing it?

Now clearly there have been cheating scandals in other areas of the country. But here in NY we have standards in place that should make cheating more difficult. That's good enough for me. If in fact there were cheating going on, why hasn't anyone reported it to me? Sure, there are a few bad apples, but the good ones would pick up their telephones and immediately expose whatever malfeasance that may be occurring.

So I ask you, New York, to simply relax. Don't worry about cheating because it's not happening here. You can trust us here at Tweed. After all, have we ever misled you in the past?

Cheat Proudly

There are allegations that cheating is up in NYC, and the only surprise is that anyone is surprised. When you place a gun to someone's head to encourage a certain sort of behavior, you are likely to elicit that target one way or another. If test scores don't go up, we close your school and the principal can go fish. The teachers become wandering subs, going from classroom to classroom in the hope we can discourage them enough to quit of their own volition.

So really, what can they expect? Maybe the next time we give a test, we allow the students to help one another. Maybe we leave a few highlighted review books around. Or maybe those decorations on the bulletin board just happen to contain the formulas or responses that they need. Maybe the teacher overlooks those little papers being passed around.

Of course, perhaps the teacher or administrator can simplify everything and simply erase the answers that aren't part of the program. This seems to have occurred en masse in DC under brilliant "reformer" Michelle Rhee. And it's human nature. If test scores are everything, if our jobs depend on them, they will be manipulated. In fact, it's not in City Hall's interest to challenge cheating. When our grades go down, theirs do too. Count on this--the cheating we hear about is the tip of the iceberg, and as long as we have this insane emphasis on test scores, it will grow exponentially worse.