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Though I realize this isn’t directly related to the issue of cheating, I’ve got to say that I’m skeptical about the design of standardized tests in general and whether they do indeed measure what they purport to measure. I feel that the performance of test designers is as open to question as the performance of teachers and students. Probably more so - who’s evaluating them?</p>
<p>At my school teachers do not proctor tests in their subject area. This year I proctored AP Calculus - wise choice as math isn’t a strong point with me - it is more like a foreign language.</p>
<p>Chill, sorghum.</p>
<p>Of course what P3T did was cheating. You can try to justify it any way you want but it’s still cheating. It would be comparable to a high school student in a 1st period class taking a language test and then coming out and telling their friends that will take the test later in the day “I’m not telling you what’s on the test but you should look up the definition of x,y and z before you go to class”. I doubt most of us would not consider that cheating.</p>
<p>Hmmm…this is reminding me of a child referred to me for an ADHD evaluation. I think the boy has a specific learning disability, is often confused in class, and that is why he appears to have trouble “focusing”. Mom tells me he failed miserably on the state (STAR) testing one year, but the next year he did quite well with “504 accommodations”. Apparently a teacher sat with him and “helped” him, although I do not recall exactly what that meant. I though it was a way to avoid providing resource services for him, but it could also have had something to do with the schools rating. He did wall on the testing, but continues to struggle in the classroom.</p>
<p>I’m astounded that anyone would defend a teacher sneaking a peek at the test, then telling her students the answers beforehand. That’s cheating. It’s obviously cheating. No wonder students grow up thinking cheating is all right; they are just following their teachers’ examples.</p>
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<p>Come on frazzled1, is it OK for every teacher to look at the test the day before and cram as much as they can with the students? Are the city kids allowed to get a boost like this too? If the teacher wrote to the test authority and stated what they had done, would action be taken against them? Is it OK because its only 2 words? Is it only OK if its done by an ethical and responsible teacher?</p>
<p>How many posts do I have to read? This case is described - very honestly - in one single post. A generally ethical and responsible person can do something wrong from time to time.</p>
<p>When my now rising college freshmen started elementary school back in kindergarten, I was volunteering to make copies for his teacher. In front of me was a 5th grade teacher making copies of a worksheet that explained what a card catalog was. Even 13 years ago, libraries used computers not card catalogs.</p>
<p>There were a couple of questions about card catalogs on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.</p>
<p>What is scary about the situation in GA is that parents put stock in our state tests as though it means something if their child passes. However, the bar is already so low and if someone is changing answers so kids will pass it is beyond pathetic.</p>
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She had time to tape the mouths of half the class before you realized what was going on? </p>
<p>Like many here, I, too, think it’s cheating if teachers get access to the test the day before and then can prep the class based on their viewing of that test. How can you think otherwise? Does your entire state give teachers access to tests the day before? Do they want the teachers to do what you did? What state is this?</p>
<p>Teachers shouldn’t proctor their own students.</p>
<p>At the risk of opening myself once again to being called an unethical cheat, I had taught 20 6-year-old children how to read over a period of 9 months for a May test. That was the curriculum. It takes 2 years to teach average children to read using classroom lessons. Many of their parents were diligent and read to them nightly, by the way, although they didn’t have 2 nickles to rub together.</p>
<p>The paragraph-long passage concerned a child walking home through his neighborhood. The only way a person could have made sense of the story is if they had personal or book experience with city life and buildings. Even children whose skills at that point enabled them to decode the word “curb” would not have understood the word after decoding (“sounding out”) k/ur/b.</p>
<p>Because I am principled, I didn’t write or show the word “curb” or to them. I wasn’t “giving them the answers.” CC readers have more often as a frame of reference high school lessons, not early elementary, and I understand that. What I did for a vocabulary lesson was describe cities, and how they build something so people can walk up one step higher to get out of the street, and that “something” is called a “curb.” </p>
<p>So on the test, any child who could (themself, during the test) decode the 4-letter printed word “curb” could have a concept. As well, to understand a curb you have to have experienced a “sidewalk.” Country children have experience with a street, a highway, a road, a path, a trail. However, children in this rural poverty town had asphalt roads that slopped onto dirt at the edges, and ditches alongside roads – not curbs and sidewalks. They have steps and stairs up to their apartments, not elevators. There was no poured concrete sidewalk anywhere in town, not even on Main Street, let alone a construct called a “sidewalk” let alone a “curb.” One child who’d been to visit relatives in a city was able to describe his experience on an “elevator.” </p>
<p>The reading of the passage and words in it was up to the children during the test. I knew that the CONCEPT of the word “curb” in the paragraph would be incomprehensible to my children, even after they could decode the words “curb” and “sidewalk” which some could and some coudn’t on any given day. </p>
<p>The best comparison I can make is if a city teacher saw that a test paragraph in Third Grade wrote about a farmer pouring the pig’s food into a “trough.” Even if a child could (and should) understand that “cough” doesn’t equate to “cow” or “coo” the child STILL can’t answer a question about pouring pig’s food into a container called a trough. </p>
<p>Oh I give up. Those who wish to understand the technicalities of teaching children how to read, along with environment experiences that enable a child to comprehend what they read, will understand here. Those who don’t will say I cheated when I taught them what a “curb” was that morning.</p>
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<p>One third. She walked through and taped closed the mouths of a third of the children in class in the amount of time it took me to close the cabinet door where I found masking tape for her. Seven children. My back was to the class closing the cabinet. The seven children sat in desk groupings. As I wrote earlier, they weren’t chatting; they were sounding out words silently on their lips and tongues as they’d been taught. The administrator saw this as “talking during a test.” They’re pretty small, too, and didn’t put up a fuss. I turned around and saw 14 EYES staring back at me with tape over their little mouths.</p>
<p>If she hadn’t asked me for tape, which she thought was so important during a test, I wouldn’t have turned my back on the class. But she had a PhD in Math and 20+ years teaching experience, so I thought she knew what she was doing. And she had power over my tenure. Tell me who should be fired in such a situation, please – the classroom teacher or the visiting administrator in that room.</p>
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<p>I couldn’t agree more. As I’ve learned from this CC exchange, there is little understanding of the dynamics of a classroom, especially with young children. </p>
<p>Please give us the morning away from the room and send in some ethicists for in-service training. For the testing in the classrooms, bring in more administrators, parent volunteers, substitute teachers. It’ll be much more objective and you’ll learn what the children really know. It will also upset the 6-year-old children so they can do their very best work and show you what they know.</p>
<p>Bring it on. Especially be sure the proctors glare at the children. That always helps, too.</p>
<p>P3t…I think people are conflating a high school test with a first grade test. </p>
<p>It’s ridiculous that these standardized tests are given to 6 year olds, honestly. I wish there were a 'better" way to make sure the kids were learning.</p>
<p>After 6th or 7th grade, kids should be tested differently, obviously. But 6 year olds cannot be expected to face the same set of circumstances. It’s contextual.</p>
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<p>Thank you. I think that’s a very fair statement. Especially those who read my posts understand the respect and esteem I hold for the CC parent community.</p>
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<p>I couldn’t agree more.</p>
<p>The problem is this is all anecdotal. On every test there will be cases of children, esp. young children, not knowing a particular vocabulary word. The problem is not that a reading passage has elevate/curb/sidewalk in it that one group of students might not have encountered. Reading tests usually have passages, vocabulary of varying difficulty, frequency that some student might not know. No student is expected to know everything. The problem would be if the passages as a general rule all presented a specific environment that many students would not know.</p>
<p>It would make sense for a teacher in a rural area to teach something about basic city life and vice versa. Regatta has a definite socio-economic context that many students might not know. Although in our town we have a “cardboard boat regatta” so many, even low income students, could infer the meaning. </p>
<p>The best tests are written by good teachers as diagnostic tools to see what part(s) of the curriculum their students have mastered. Standardized tests are something entirely different. They serve a purpose but should not be the be all and end all of any evaluation. Teaching to the test when the test is a good one designed to evaluate student learning is not a bad thing. Teaching to the test when the test is poorly designed or doesn’t really measure learning is as bad as the test.</p>
<p>As one poster pointed out, the GA tests are at a very low level, so when students don’t do well, it means they lack basic skills. Cheating in any circumstance is shortchanging the students whose education is suffering as a result. If teachers and administrators are willing to cheat, then they dedication to student learning has to be called into question. At the same time, the overwhelming focus on standardized test sets up a situation where overworked teachers and unscrupulous administrators are heavily tempted to cheat.</p>
<p>^great post, imho</p>
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<p>:eek:! Lawdy-</p>
<p>She must have done this before- to do it so fast-</p>
<p>My D is starting an MAT program which is associated with a K8 school ( private) big on experiential learning- but are there any books you recommend for her about public schools? ( I imagine she will try and work in a public setting- as she is also going to try and get some loans forgiven)</p>
<p>Our current superintendent wants to use classroom test scores to determine teacher pay- hard luck to the teachers with a higher FRL or ESL %
:rolleyes:</p>
<p>Plus our Supe says " class size doesn’t matter".
Isn’t she a pistol?</p>
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Correct - if teachers find it’s a good thing and ethical to divulge details of a forthcoming exam to students, these teachers should publish a guide with their names and school districts and be open about exactly what they do so that it can be established as the norm. The testing organization can publish a vocab guide - pig/curb/udder/sidewalk will appear on the next test, and all schools are at liberty to teach their kids about it. </p>
<p>While PT3 is correct that many of us are judging elementary school testing and high school testing along the same lines, as long as we accept cutting corners for one class of students, what would be different if other high school teachers who administer tests use similar justification and feel ethical and honest about it too? What would be different about another teacher actually doing the test with the class the previous day? If you don’t follow rules, who decides at what point the rule breaking is recommended and at what point it’s improper?</p>
<p>I still agree with those who feel that as long as the teachers are evaluated by test results, they should not be permitted to look at the test in advance or have anything to do with administering it because they have a such a vested interest in making the results appear better than they really are.</p>
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As p3t has now shared with us, she hardly “crammed as much as she could” with her students. She incorporated the words into a concept vocabulary lesson before the test. I agree that many posters here are applying an understanding of high school testing procedures to primary grade tests.</p>
<p>She also told us that “we saw the tests the day before and anyone who wished to could do a last-minute lesson in new, unfamiliar vocabulary.” She didn’t tell us how teachers were able to see the tests the day before, and I should have considered how that was possible before responding. If there were written instructions forbidding teachers to see the tests beforehand, or if the test booklets were sealed, I’d agree that it’s unethical to look at them ahead of time. If there was no clear understanding, I would need to know what instructions were in effect before seeing it that way. </p>
<p>I don’t see this as a debate about what is or is not okay for city kids. What they have in common with p3t’s students is poverty (well, that and tests which don’t measure achievement objectively because they presuppose a universal exposure to certain words and concepts). I’d like every student to be well-prepared to take any test. How can they be well-prepared if entire concepts are foreign to them? Is a first-grade teacher supposed to expose them to every 1- and 2- syllable word in the dictionary before the test? Otherwise, aren’t the tests really measuring cultural differences instead of reading comprehension? I’m fine with testing (well, high-stakes standardized testing for 7 y/os is silly, but some important folks really like the idea). However, shouldn’t the tests measure what they’re telling us they do? </p>
<p>Folks who think this was cheating won’t be convinced by anything I have to say. But I don’t see it that way.</p>
<p>At my D!s college- they had non-proctored tests for some classes- it was not unusual for exams to be taken in their dorm room, or on the lawn.</p>
<p>Depending on what is being tested- when the test is written well, there isn’t any way that having a book infront of you is going to help, if you don’t understand the material in the first place.</p>
<p>I think if there was more emphasis on developing appropriate curriculum and on attaining a basic level of understanding before adding more pieces, there would not have to be such an emphasis on " standardized testing".</p>
<p>What should be tested is the curriculum & support for the classroom /teacher .</p>