Are Online Tests the Key to Addressing Cheating?
The Honolulu Star Advertiser today ran a story (entitled "Cheating by Educators Rare in Hawaii") about the Atlanta cheating scandal vis-a-vis Hawaii:
Revelations of widespread cheating by educators in Atlanta to boost test scores are raising questions about efforts to ensure the integrity of statewide tests and the pressures of high-stakes testing.
...
This year the Hawaii State Assessment was conducted entirely online, an approach considered more secure than traditional paper exams, where students in a classroom take the same test and answers can be altered after tests are collected.
"It's a lot more difficult to cheat on an online test, especially an adaptive online test in which all the kids are looking at different items," said Jon Cohen, executive vice president of American Institutes for Research, which handles Hawaii's test. "This test is set up so that if a kid is away from a test for 20 minutes, nobody can go back and change their answers."
"This is not to say that it's impossible for someone to cheat on our test," he added, "but we're not at risk for the sort of cheating that you saw in Atlanta."
Is shifting from paper-based testing to online, computer-based testing the best way to address these issues? What do you think?
Full article online at: http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/hawaiinews/20110718__Cheating_by_educ...
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Technologies May Curb Online Cheating
According to a recently published U.S. News and World Report blog,
For more, be sure to check out the full article online at: http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2011/08/19/technologies-may-curb-online-cheating.
Cheating
Doug,
It's interesting that the research and the "solutions" being developed, re: cheating on high stakes testing, focus only on the act of cheating. There is a neglect of the real question needing to be answered, "Why do students, and in some cases teachers, feel they need to cheat on these tests?"
It seems as if the current appraoch to the issue is to treat the symptom and see if the disease goes away, rather than addressing the fundamental disease that leads to the symptom.
- Greg
the symptom or the disease?
To Greg's point, I have heard people say that we should be teaching kids things that they can't find easily on Google. If we create situations in classrooms where students attempt to solve complex, real-world problems, the notion of cheating diminishes because there may be more than one "right" answer and how the student(s) arrived at the answer is important as well. The vision from the consortia is that these kinds of "problems" will be on the new assessments. Here's hoping.
Open Tests?
Eric Hanushek over at EducationNext offers another inventive potential solution to this problem: just make all of the test items available and encourage teachers to use them as part of their regular lessons. Here's the meat of the proposal:
"It starts with developing a large item bank of test questions of varying difficulty. Imagine 1,500 questions for fourth grade math that cover the entire scope of appropriate material from basic to advanced topics. Next, make all of the test items – not just sample items – publicly available and encourage teachers to teach to the test, because the items cover the full range of the desired curriculum. Making the items public will also ensure the quality of the test items. One could invite feedback ratings or open sourcing to provide a path to improving the questions over time. Then, move to computerized adaptive testing, where answers to an initial set of questions move the student to easier or more difficult items based on responses. This testing permits accurate assessments at varying levels while lessening test burden from excessive questions that provide little information on individual student performance. Such assessments would not be limited to minimally proficient levels that are the focus of today’s tests, and thus they could provide useful information to districts that find current testing too easy. Students would be given a random selection of questions, and the answers would go directly into the computer – bypassing the erasure checks, the comparison of responses with other students, and the like."
Could see a lot of value to such an approach...
Mixed bag
Hanushek 's is an interesting idea. As I read the paragraph I felt myself cringe one moment and smile the next. I am not a big fan of "doing the same thing differently," and there is uneasy sense that that is what is being suggested (I could be wrong though). Do we want to encourage teaching to the test at all, even if we disguise it as fitting into the entire curricular spectrum? I don't see the benefit of maintaining a focus on the test, at the expense of the learning.
I do like the adaptive aspect, where the testing provides feedback that can be beneficial to learner and teacher. I can see Hanushekpoint's point, "Such assessments would not be limited to minimally proficient levels that are the focus of today’s tests, and thus they could provide useful information to districts . . ." but only if the approach in the learning environment is to help the learner be able to learn to construct meaning out of the information/ideas they are asked to explore. If the focus of the curriculum contniues to focus on being able to succeed on a test that is still compartmentalized (the way most of them are) that defeats the idea of helping the learner develop the critical skills needed to innovate and create.
Rather than a string of questions, what if the tests were designed to incorporate both collaborative and individual requirements and resulted in the generation of new solutions to an existing problem? The idea of interwoven content knowledge would require students AND teachers to piece together a fractured curriculum so that it allows the learner to see the natural connections between the "stuff" they are asked to learn . . . it might go a long way to eliminating the quesiont, "When am I ever going to use this." from student vernacular.
Real world problem solving
I am hoping right along with you. While I was working on my MA at Pepperdine, we had a discusion about whether sharing answers, whether on an assignment or a test, was a form of cheating. The education landscape doesn't value the act of collaborative investigation and learning the way it needs to. I often wonder if students turned in a "wikipedia" style response to an assignement, if it would be acceptable. The whole idea of a number of individuals accomplishing one goal doesn't fit well into the testing culture.
That being said, it is good for students to test themselves via forms of assessment that might look like summative tests. Not as a means to determine if they "have arrived," but rather to see if they are on the right track and if they need to make course adjustments. If testing took on a predominately formative nature, it would be beneficial for learner, parent, and teacher. Included in that needs to be the type of problem-solving you define, Geoff. In fact, a set of assessments that were almost exclusively designed that way might very well go a long way in changing the learning landscapes we see in education currently.