Before transferring to be closer to home, I spent my first two years of college at a school with a strong honor code that forbade cheating. I thought that was great -- but every year we had students expelled for violating the honor code. I really wonder how much impact this new proposal from the TEA will have on the problem of TAKS cheating.

Students will be asked to sign honor pledges next year that they will not cheat on the state's high-stakes test, and school districts could suffer lower ratings if cheating is found, education officials said Monday.

Frankly, I don't know that having the kids sign honor pledges imposed from outside will have any impact on a kid bound and determined to cheat. But i do like this idea.

They'll also use several test versions in the same classroom, making it harder for a student to look over someone's shoulder and make cheating easier to spot if they do, because all seats will be assigned.

Having multiple versions in the same classroom only makes sense, in my book -- and my school has already implemented the assigned seats model and had encouraged it even before it was a mandate.

But for all the talk of "widespread cheating" on the test, the statistics do not really bear that out.

The education agency has been battling allegations of widespread cheating on standardized tests for the past 2 1/2 years. In 2006, Utah-based Caveon Test Security was hired to conduct a study of test scores, and flagged about 700 Texas schools for irregularities.

State investigations cleared most of the schools of cheating allegations. But 16, including four Houston charter schools, remain on the list of campuses with testing irregularities.

In a state the size of Texas, 16 schools is not that significant. And as is pointed out by one school administrator, the initial group of 700 schools got flagged for doing the thing that the tests were supposed to encourage -- improve student performance.

However, Gonzalez said he hopes TEA has a better independent audit than the one done by Caveon. Those flagged schools were publicly named before local officials had a chance to review and contest the data even though the vast majority were cleared.

"They dinged you if your scores were too good even if it was from all the tutorials and steps we took to help kids do better," he said.

In other words, finding a program that works was initially deemed evidence of cheating by the company hired to do the reviews. If such a standard is applied this year, I can only imagine how my school's leap in math scores will be interpreted -- even though it can be accounted for by changes in scheduling, class size, methodology and resources allotted to the math department.

Of course, I personally believe the TAKS test to be a joke. I don't believe it shows what it claims to show, and doesn't measure what it claims to measure. maybe, just maybe, the impending change to end-of-course tests will fix that problem.

Posted by: Greg at 01:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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