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Test Takers Get Chance To Cheat

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Nick Palluth, 17, has figured out how easy it is to cheat on the state test given to about 3 million students each year. Because the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills is the benchmark for public school education, he says he wants to share his findings so state officials will fix the problem.

Here’s how Nick, a Keller High School student, explains it:

“As a high school junior, we take three consecutive days of exit TAKS tests. On the first day of the tests, each student was given a test packet with all three tests and also an answer booklet for all three subjects.

“Each day we would break a seal to open the section in the test packet. By the third day, all sections were open. Each day we were given back our answer sheet. Yes, one answer sheet had all three tests on it, and no, it was not corrected in between tests.

“Now a student could easily take advantage of this. In fact, as students do, several of us would talk after each test and realize what mistakes we had made. We could very easily go in the next day and correct those mistakes.”

Nick says he didn’t cheat because he knew he was going to pass and graduate anyway. But he says he is bothered by how easy it would be.

“I wonder how many other people discovered the same thing and how many actually cheated?” he says.

When I hear this from Nick, I have a difficult time believing it. The state education system is built around these tests. Surely state officials, worried about test security after recent findings of cheating in the Dallas and Houston school districts, wouldn’t give students the previous days’ tests and their same answer sheets back, along with a pencil and an eraser?

That’s like giving a big slice of pizza to a hungry teenager and saying, “Don’t eat this.”

Well, get this: The state does give the equivalent of pizza to hungry students.

A Texas Education Agency official confirms that high school sophomores and juniors, for example, do take math, science and social studies tests on three consecutive days. They do get all their tests in one booklet, which is returned to them each day. They do use the same answer sheet all three days.

TEA spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe tells The Watchdog: “Theoretically, a student could do what you’re describing. It’s a violation of test security, and if a school district is aware of that, they’re supposed to report it to us.

“We occasionally get reports of a situation like this, but not frequent reports. And the test monitor could face some kind of sanction if they permitted this to go on.”

State rules require one test monitor for each 30 students taking the test. How hard is it to flip a few pages back in the booklet and make a change on the answer sheet when the monitor isn’t looking?

Ratcliffe says students are informed that they are supposed to work only on one portion of the test each day and “not go backwards.”

If a student is caught going backward, punishment is left to the school district. At a minimum, that test, she says, is marked with an “O” code for “other” and is not counted.

I asked David Hakensen, spokesman for Pearson Educational Measurement, the Iowa company that produces the TAKS for Texas, about why the tests are constructed this way. He listened and said he would find out. He never called me back.

But standardized test experts I talked to last week said they were surprised to learn that this is how Texas conducts its tests.

“It doesn’t sound very secure to me,” said Jay P. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Linda McSpadden McNeil, co-director of the Center for Education at Rice University, said: “Despite the millions of tax dollars invested in the state testing system, we end up with a sloppy test.”

Herbert J. Walberg, a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University, said the testing procedure violates common sense.

“This has all the makings of corruption of the instrument, of cheating on the test,” he said. “Clearly, it would be far better to have separate test booklets and separate test forms.”

Sara Arispe, Fort Worth school district’s coordinator of assessment and accountability, says students are warned not to go backward on their tests. Test monitors are trained to make sure this doesn’t happen, and they also must take an oath to do everything they can to prevent cheating.

“We have very high expectations of our test monitors,” she says. “It goes so far as saying that we don’t want our test monitors sitting down on test day for four to six hours. They are up walking around and monitoring students.”

Wally Carter, the Arlington school district’s testing director, says: “If it’s happening, it’s happening probably throughout the state. If anything, there would be an inflation of all the state’s test results.”

TEA’s Ratcliffe says: “In any system that involves millions of people, you’ll never be able to weed out all the cheating, but we get a tiny percentage of people that even attempt it.”

Carter says that testing coordinators like him have complained to the state repeatedly about this system of booklets and answer sheets.

“We have said to TEA, ‘It would be nicer if you guys had separate test booklets so we wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of stuff.’ And they’ll immediately say, ‘It’s a budget issue.’”

Ratcliffe responds: “We’re already dealing with 12 million secure test materials each year. So that number would grow substantially [with separate booklets], which might create a bigger security risk than the current system because you’d have more booklets that could get into the wrong hands.”

Carter has a suggestion: Why not, he asks, create the test booklets with perforations so that after each day’s test is done, that test could be torn off, and only the next day’s test booklet would remain in the booklet. Without the booklet, students would have trouble remembering which question matched which answer on their answer sheets.

“It’s an interesting idea,” Ratcliffe says. “It’s probably worth exploring to see what it would cost.”

No matter the cost, Stanford’s Walberg says it is worth it: “The costs of tests are minuscule compared to the total cost of a child’s education in a given year.”

Nick Palluth, who blew the whistle on this, says it is easier to cheat on the TAKS than it is to cheat in his English class.

He adds, “I find it extremely amusing that the state developed TAKS to test how smart the kids are, but I end up wondering how smart the test makers are.”

An invitation

Final note: You’re invited to attend my ninth annual Yankee Cowboy Miniature Golf & Bowling Tournament for the Summer Santa children’s charity summer camp fund. The event is 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at Brunswick Zone Watauga, 7301 Rufe Snow Drive. Cost is $10 for two games of bowling or one round of mini-golf. All moms play free. For information, contact me by phone or e-mail listed below.

Research assistance was provided by news researcher Marcia Melton.

 

Dave Lieber, Star-Telegram

Date: 05/06/2006