Snarfangel: allow teachers to give the tests to their own class.

Um... who else is going to give it? Are you going to pay for subs to proctor the exam? That'd be a waste of taxpayer money dontchaknow

I had a Physics 3 prof tell me once 'If you're going to cheat, go ahead. I can't stop you. But be smart about it, because if I catch you, I've got a ton of paperwork to fill out and I don't want to do it."

Meet Us at the Stick: Snarfangel: allow teachers to give the tests to their own class.

Um... who else is going to give it? Are you going to pay for subs to proctor the exam? That'd be a waste of taxpayer money dontchaknow

ALL special area teachers and paraprofessionals have to be in classrooms helping to proctor during AIMS (Arizona) testing in my old district.

That's too bad about Chula Vista, though. They have the best Mariachi program in the country. It's impressive.

Don't make teachers jobs depend upon the results of kids' scores on standardized tests, and you'll see a lot less cheating by teachers. And don't make school district funding depend upon overall school scores of standardized tests, and you'll see a lot fewer administrators being complicit in the cheating by teachers.

Funny how that works.

Meet Us at the Stick: Snarfangel: allow teachers to give the tests to their own class.

Um... who else is going to give it? Are you going to pay for subs to proctor the exam? That'd be a waste of taxpayer money dontchaknow

Well...you could have teachers swap classes and give exams to other teacher's class.

just a thought.

If teachers spent a little time writing good tests, it would be much harder for kids to cheat. Hard to cheat on an essay question, but if youre just using multiple choice questions provided by the textbook publisher, well, youre not really testing anything anyway.

I can remember the few times i did cheat in high school, it was stuff i knew anyway, but my cheating was half to save me time and half out of spite for the test being worthless. I understand the pythagorean theorem, but when the test is 25 questions that are all the exact same operation but just different values, im gonna use the triangle calculator i installed on my TI83 so i can finish the test and read my book.

Farxist: Gyrfalcon: Don't make teachers jobs depend upon the results of kids' scores on standardized tests, and you'll see a lot less cheating by teachers. And don't make school district funding depend upon overall school scores of standardized tests, and you'll see a lot fewer administrators being complicit in the cheating by teachers.

Funny how that works.

Hire honest teachers.
Make it really easy to fire bad and/or dishonest teachers
Funny how the real world works.

You're being disingenuous at best, or just plain stupid. This was not a problem back when we were in school, when everyone was not looking at the scores of STARS tests to determine whether a teacher was good or bad, and whether a district would continue to get funding or not. My teachers gave us tests to see what we'd learned, not whether we could fill in the right bubbles on a three-day statewide test.

You'll notice that it's only these types of tests where teacher cheating seems to occur, not on the ordinary quizzes and midterms that teachers give. Because the teachers don't get evaluated on those kinds of tests, and the districts don't get ranked on those kind of tests. It's just the state testing that anyone worries about, ergo, those are the ones teachers give students the answers to.

I agree with Gyrfalcon and I have to say that a good teacher will examine the material that needs to be covered for their subject and at the beginning of the year center their curriculum around these sets of standards. I know that sometimes the teachers don't know specifically what they will be tested on always, but there is a pool of knowledge the students are expected to know.
Another very important aspect to being successful without having to cheat is taking responsibility as a teacher to talk to the kids who 'don't get it': It's not that they 'don't get it', but that they probably utilize a different style of learning than the other children. Teachers are taught about the different styles of learning in their college classes, or should at least know that before they set foot in a classroom. some kids are visual people, others auditory, others hands-on. etc.

Cyno01: If teachers spent a little time writing good tests, it would be much harder for kids to cheat.

So you have no idea how NCLB works, or what a "standardized test" is. The teachers DON'T write the tests, the state does. That's the whole problem with standardized tests, it ends up not actually testing anything but "how well can you take a test". Which is not a valuable life skill.

This one's one of my personal pet peeves, since an "education" major in undergrad is a pretty ridiculously easy major knowledge-wise...."Wanna teach high school math? You'd better have a math or math-heavy BS" system would do wonders for secondary ed at least. You can take care of all the social 'dealing with kids' stuff during the apprenticeship period, pretty sure every state requires one.

Some majors may be like that, but I had to know an immense amount of information before I was 'released' from college. I mean I had to learn a lot of information about basically every instrument (musical) known to man, and had to learn some piano skills that has resulted in some brilliant musicians at the college I attended never being able to fully graduate and move on to other jobs.

When it comes to dealing with kids, there's a difference between doing your student teaching in a cushy community where the kids are polite but after graduation maybe only being able to land a job at an inner-city ALC. Those ALC kids will eat you alive. In fact I would be willing to say that most education programs don't fully prepare teachers for dealing with students, unruly or obedient.

I do not approve of teachers cheating on standardized tests, but I can understand it.

In the schools where I teach as a substitute teacher, there a lot of transient kids. Some are Hispanic, they and/or their parents likely illegal immigrants, other kids who, due to their family situations, move from one school's neighborhood to another or even different school districts. So, while they may be at one school this year, they will be at another the next, with a whole new crop of kids coming in to replace them who were not there the year before and, thus, are not reflective of how well the school is doing. Accordingly, the tests have no way of reflecting that. The tests go on the assumption that all the kids in 7th grade that were tested are the exact same ones tested in 8th grade. IOW, oft times the kids tested one year are not tested on how well they learned at that school, but at the one they attended the year before, for good or ill.

To top that off, a good number of those kids just don't give a shiat about the tests. A perfect case in point is the experience I had at one middle school four or five years ago. I was there subbing for one teacher for two days, two days over which I was proctoring a bunch of sixth graders in the library while they took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

There were three kids at one table, two girls and one boy, who just decided this was the perfect place to just act out, screw around and be disruptive. After the first day, I decided that the next day, they were going to be split up, in order to knock off this shiat. On the second day, I sat them at three different tables, with at least one or two tables between each. This, of course, caused a lot of pissing and moaning from the little shiats. It was especially so with one girl. She was acting like I had violated national sovereignty.

I passed out the Scantron bubble answer sheets and then the test booklets. As I got to her with the test booklet, I found her just randomly filling in the bubbles on the answer sheet, just dit, dit, dit,dit and then declaring, "I done!" folding her arms across her chest and glaring at me. She just "Christmas treed it.

I tried to reason with her, explaining that how well she did on this would determine what classes she would be in next year, but she didn't care and was quite vocal about it. Enough. I just said to her, "Fine. End up in the dummies class, see if I care," and walked back to the front and started the test for every one else.

Sure enough, she was in the dummies' classes next year.

It isn't all the teachers' fault. If the kids don't want to learn and the parents don't push them to do well and at least try, yeah, they are going to fail.