Shortly after Brian Jacob and I did our research on teachers who cheat, we thought about starting a company that would provide cheating detection services to schools systems. What I quickly discovered, however, was that there were few things in the world that school systems wanted less than to catch teachers who cheat — suffice it to say that school districts have few incentives to self-police. As such, we quickly abandoned the idea.
Maybe now it’s time for someone else to give it a shot. With No Child Left Behind and other policies making standardized test scores more and more important, the incentives to cheat are growing rapidly. The New York Times recently ran an article by Ford Fessenden describing gross instances of cheating that were missed by school districts until whistleblowers came forward. There is little question that cheating is still widespread — which, given cheating’s low likelihood of detection, should come as no surprise.
Are school districts more likely today to be receptive to an outsider selling cheating detection services than they were back when we first thought about doing it? Definitely not. What programs like No Child Left Behind have changed, however, is the stake that higher levels of government have in getting rid of cheating. State and federal governments are now allocating large amounts of money based on test scores. They don’t want to be in the business of generously rewarding cheaters. Relative to the money at stake, the costs of detecting cheaters is trivial — maybe a nickel per student per year, which seems like a small price to pay. Unlike individual school districts, state governments care about catching cheaters — or at least, they should.
I know of only one company that is currently in the business: a test security firm called Caveon. Perhaps there are others. It seems like the market should be big enough to support competition.
If anyone is interested, the algorithms we used are fully described in our paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Feel free to use them. In return, all we ask is that you let us know how it goes (and maybe share some data with us down the road).
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Given that No Child Left Behind links federal money to test score performance, there is a public interest in having the problem of cheating classrooms resolved. It would seem logical to create a federal grant to fund test accountability.
Given that No Child Left Behind links federal money to test score performance, there is a public interest in having the problem of cheating classrooms resolved. It would seem logical to create a federal grant to fund test accountability.
No Child Left Behind (except the smart ones) is destroying America by removing critical thinking from the classroom. Now teachers simply have kids memorize a few facts to pass a test so they get a bonus. We don’t need to make it more efficient we need to find a way to get rid of it.
No Child Left Behind (except the smart ones) is destroying America by removing critical thinking from the classroom. Now teachers simply have kids memorize a few facts to pass a test so they get a bonus. We don’t need to make it more efficient we need to find a way to get rid of it.
There should be a nation-wide classification standard. A school / school district system that actively attempts to catch cheaters via the algorithms is stamped with “Teaching Integrity Approved” or something a little bit more eloquent.
That way, colleges or anyone else who cares about the integrity of the test-scores can see where students come from. As a result, parents would yell and kick at schools for not implementing it since it helps boosts a school’s reputation and thus the student’s.
There should be a nation-wide classification standard. A school / school district system that actively attempts to catch cheaters via the algorithms is stamped with “Teaching Integrity Approved” or something a little bit more eloquent.
That way, colleges or anyone else who cares about the integrity of the test-scores can see where students come from. As a result, parents would yell and kick at schools for not implementing it since it helps boosts a school’s reputation and thus the student’s.
I’m not sure that paying for such information would be beneficial for a school system in the long run. The big question is, even if a school were able to identify cheaters, what would they be able to do? If they fire them, then they have to replace them. And given the teacher shortage in some areas, that can be incredibly difficult. The current school I teach at is short over a dozen teachers. From a state perspective, identifying cheating schools would mean what? More financial sanctions and possibly a state take-over of the school. Both of these options appear to be just as detrimental to the students as investing the money to prevent cheating. I don’t know alot about state takeover or how it works, but even if the state does take over, they still have to supply the school with teachers that are able to teach effectively. If they just hire all of the same teachers over again, they’d achieve the status quo.
Too, increasing the level of accountability has been known to contribute to the negative animosities that are already present in schools, where administrators often times make public the test statistics of teachers as a negative consequence for bad scores. This is done because there are likely only a few ways to motivate teachers to raise student test scores. There is not a high supply of teachers and there is an incredibly high demand, which means that having a bad teacher in a classroom is much better than having no teacher at all.
With the money that schools or states might spend to hold schools accountable, these schools could use the money to invest in more positive consequences such as teacher success incentives, and programs that actually prepare the students for the tests, so that school districts don’t need to think about cheating. I guess the problem with giving more money to teachers who have students who perform well on tests is that it would provide a higher incentive for teachers to cheat so that they can get a pay raise.
I’m not sure that paying for such information would be beneficial for a school system in the long run. The big question is, even if a school were able to identify cheaters, what would they be able to do? If they fire them, then they have to replace them. And given the teacher shortage in some areas, that can be incredibly difficult. The current school I teach at is short over a dozen teachers. From a state perspective, identifying cheating schools would mean what? More financial sanctions and possibly a state take-over of the school. Both of these options appear to be just as detrimental to the students as investing the money to prevent cheating. I don’t know alot about state takeover or how it works, but even if the state does take over, they still have to supply the school with teachers that are able to teach effectively. If they just hire all of the same teachers over again, they’d achieve the status quo.
Too, increasing the level of accountability has been known to contribute to the negative animosities that are already present in schools, where administrators often times make public the test statistics of teachers as a negative consequence for bad scores. This is done because there are likely only a few ways to motivate teachers to raise student test scores. There is not a high supply of teachers and there is an incredibly high demand, which means that having a bad teacher in a classroom is much better than having no teacher at all.
With the money that schools or states might spend to hold schools accountable, these schools could use the money to invest in more positive consequences such as teacher success incentives, and programs that actually prepare the students for the tests, so that school districts don’t need to think about cheating. I guess the problem with giving more money to teachers who have students who perform well on tests is that it would provide a higher incentive for teachers to cheat so that they can get a pay raise.