The state Board of Regents will vote today on whether to prohibit teachers from grading their own students' exams, a practice education officials believe has led to cheating on standardized tests.

Why are we even asking this question? Letting teachers grade these tests makes about as much sense as allowing the students to do so.

It's especially dumb for teachers to grade thier own students if teachers are evaluated based on thier students test scores. That's a huge fraud risk.

They teach the kids to pass an exam and then wonder if they will cheat....How about we teach the kids to have them learn instead...

Homeschooling FTW

attention span of a retarded fruit fly:
Homeschooling FTW

because the teacher is always smarter than the student.

Every kid is above average.

...........for Obama.

They get 2,100,000 in funding to do analysis and then no one gets fired.

why bother?

just change how testing is graded.

Here's an Idea....
ASSUMING the Republicrat position that the Union is keeping rooms full of teachers who can't teach (due to investigations or double dipping or whatever). How about we send them the tests to grade. Take a load off of the teachers who do work.

I don't see what the problem is. After all, they are only thinking of the children. The goddam CHILDREN!

Lemme get this tight.

You 'trust' this teacher enough that you hope they won't rape your kid, but not enough that they will commit fraud?

ROFLMAO!!!

Stronger background checks. There's your answer.

Every teacher, principal, and janitor in every school my kids went to, or are currently going. I've police reports on all of them. If they hire a new person, I get an email, and I request their police record.

If you don't, then don't biatch when your kid ends up in a ditch.

gadian: video man: Also, as a side-note/CSB, I graduated HS in 2008, making me a part of the "No Child Left Behind" generation. I don't recall one instance of my public school "teaching to the exam". All we got was: "Oh hey, there's a standardized test on dateOfTest; it's going to over subjectTitle. Good luck!". That was it.

Here's the kicker: we usually had the best scores.

/Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.

The thing is, you were a part of the system so long, you didn't even realize that they were "teaching to the test". You'd never had any other kind of education.

Or maybe they just taught general academic areas that were taught by the test, and the test measured that.

the illogical, unscientific, fallacy filled overemphasis on standardized testing is corrupting and corroding the entire educational system from the ivory towers to the classrooms and back again . . . anyone who believes standardized testing accurately measures much aside from how much money the test making/taking companies rack up is, in my experience, delusional or ignorant . . . it is politics driven and has little to do with the actual education or learning of students . . . letting politicians drive and control trends and spending in education is about as intelligent as it sounds . . .
anyone serious about exploring just some of the bologna involved in standardized testing might check out http://www.fairtest.org/

asciibaron: attention span of a retarded fruit fly:
Homeschooling FTW

because the teacher is always smarter than the student.

I see someone didn't ever rub elbows with the education majors on campus. I wouldn't put much stock in your statement past the 8th grade.

/never met a dumber group of people in my life

as far as the article goes, it is likely that cheating is rampant in NY if teachers are correcting their own students's standardized tests . . . in Los Angeles where i taught primary school for over 20 years, test taking security measures were pretty strictly enforced, at my school at least . . . tests are always scored by off campus scanning by the testing companies, and that scanning of tests is set up to detect signs of cheating, like evidence of questionable erasures/answer changing and patterns where suspicious numbers of students answered any particular question correctly . . . we had to sign out tests minutes before testing began everyday, and return them, along with all related materials including scratch paper, paper rulers, within minutes of the end of testing each day - even with such measures i'm fairly certain cheating still occurs, some by teachers, some by administrators and some by students - making test results even more useless as benchmarks -
just one of many examples nationwide are covered in this article

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/education/06atlanta.html

attention span of a retarded fruit fly: They teach the kids to pass an exam and then wonder if they will cheat....How about we teach the kids to have them learn instead...

Homeschooling FTW

The problem is the teacher who teaches them to learn instead doesn't spend as much time on the test material. They get lower test scores and they're fired as a bad teacher.

Likewise, the teacher who doesn't cheat gets lower test scores than the one that does--and thus gets fired.

I don't blame the teachers here. They're put in a position that severely punishes good behavior.