High-stakes Cheating

A Dallas Morning News investigation has concluded that tens of thousands of students cheat on the high-stakes assessment test that Texas students take each year. Guided by a test-cheating expert, the reporters compared patterns of wrong answers on individual student answer sheets. If two or more shared a pattern that would not occur randomly more than once in 10,000 cases, they concluded that the students collaborated.

In some schools, 90 percent of the answer sheets showed the tell-tale signs of cheating. The top-cheating schools were charters—they were four times as bad as regular public schools. But many public schools were also caught. (Two-thirds of all schools showed no evidence of cheating.)

After an earlier exposé, the state hired a test-security company, which found 700 schools where cheating seemed to have happened. According to the company, on the 2005 11th-grade math test, 6.1 percent of the answer sheets were compromised.

But, the newspaper reported, the state’s follow-up amounted to asking school officials whether there might be cheating at their schools. Surprise! Everyone said no. Following the new report, state officials said they’d take another look.