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Education

Only Two States Have Rules To Prevent Cheating On Computerized Tests 95

Posted by Soulskill from the eyes-on-your-test-no-keyloggers-keep-your-botnet-to-yourself dept.
New submitter Williamcole sends news that in many U.S. states, educators will begin administering standardized tests on school computers this school year. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, for the sneakier kids), only two states have codified regulations to prevent cheating and make sure the tests are secure: Oregon and Delaware. According to a new report (PDF) from American College Testing (ACT), the other states aren't doing enough to prevent keyloggers, transmission of test materials, or even teachers going in afterward to change a student's responses. They also warn that the kids will likely find ways to access the internet while taking the test, letting them look up answers as needed. Even the rules in Oregon and Delaware have weaknesses ACT recommends strengthening before testing begins.
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Only Two States Have Rules To Prevent Cheating On Computerized Tests More

Only Two States Have Rules To Prevent Cheating On Computerized Tests

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  • Using the Internet to Look up Answers! Tut Tut! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Sunday October 05, 2014 @01:23AM (#48066727) Homepage Journal

    The odd thing is, after succeeding at exams and leaving education with a glowing set of grades, they'll get a job in which if they refused to use the internet to look up answers, they'd be fired.

    • The odd thing is, after succeeding at exams and leaving education with a glowing set of grades, they'll get a job in which if they refused to use the internet to look up answers, they'd be fired.

      This. I have a Stack Overflow tab open up as a pinned tab.

    • Ideally the examination would involve a test of the student's ability to utilise their knowledge through some form of project. In practice this is impractical - coursework requires a substantial amount of examiner's time, and that means expense. Simple exam papers can be marked almost automatically. They are also legally safe, because the standard can be set down in absolute terms: Do this, get a mark. A more subjective evaluation would be subject to all manner of appeals and a great many students suing the

    • under the law that can make you a felon just even just use the internet can fit in to the very broad laws much less changing a grade.

      http://dcourier.com/main.asp?S... [dcourier.com]

      Felon just for that?

    • I'm not sure there's a good way to test basic knowledge while accurately simulating the real world. For instance, vocabulary (analogies, etc.) would be out, unless you ratcheted the time allowance down low enough so as to preclude looking up the definition of each word. Questions that test students' knowledge of simple algebra would be out; they could just plug them into an online equation solver.

    • This is only insightful for a myopic subset of the population being referenced.

      Make a list of professions where this is the case, and one where it is not the case. Even removing the ones where your grades are not relevant, parent post applies to a minorit.

    • Fortunately the knowledge required in school tests is very rudimentary, to the extent that it seems to make perfect sense to me to ask for it - so that these people, once they get a job, would have at least a faint idea what to look for on the Internet in the first place.

      • >Fortunately the knowledge required in school tests is very rudimentary

        Um, basic calculus isn't rudimentary. It took centuries for mathematicians of exceeding smartness to work it out.
        Once the idea was out there, people ran with it but you cannot claim the basic idea is rudimentary.

        • It's rudimentary compared to the totality of knowledge you'll be required to work with in the workplace (unless you're flipping burgers, of course).

    • they'll get a job in which if they refused to use the internet to look up answers, they'd be fired.

      And which jobs would those be?

      The only jobs I can think of where that would apply would be those where your responsibility is for reporting events that take place on the Internet. e.g. "timothy", "samzenpus" and "soulskill" might potentially be subject to such sanctions.

      If you're talking about other sorts of jobs, e.g. software coding, then the most effective tool might be to look for appropriate code on the

      • >And which jobs would those be?

        Any engineering, legal, IT, programming, design, science or other creative task where being correct matters.

        • Well, I work on the borderline between science, design and engineering. If the answers in my business were on the internet anywhere, then someone, somewhere would be getting seriously fired (black-listed internationally too) for breaching commercial confidentiality.

          If you're talking about reference data ... well, I carry colour reference charts in my work bag ; micrometers and other size-references ; PDFs of standard forms for recording the raw data that I collect ; PDFs of published papers defining how to

  • Or how about... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Sunday October 05, 2014 @01:26AM (#48066731) Homepage

    We do away with standardize testing. "No child left behind" has become "Every child left behind", because those that are great at particular skills are punished in our education system for being ahead of others.

    Just yesterday I was chatting with a student in a programming class. She was complaining that she got in trouble for using language features that were "not taught yet" in the class. And this is exactly why the United States is falling behind in science and technology compared to other countries, because people are punished for self-education and innovation within our "education system"

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      We do away with standardize testing. "No child left behind" has become "Every child left behind", because those that are great at particular skills are punished in our education system for being ahead of others.

      Standardized testing is older then NCLB. SATs, ACTs, etc., are all exams students take because there's no way to normalize school marks otherwise. I mean, if you're a university, you can't rely on grades alone to figure out if the student is good (or what they claim as extracurricular activities) Gr

      • Mary Beard has written an excellent article about the pros and cons of standardised testing (unfortunately, I have the version in her book, so don't have a link to the original handy). The problem with standardised testing is that you need a mark scheme that can be applied evenly by a load of different examiners. This effectively limits you to 'this essay must make 5 of these points:' sorts of thing, rather than 'this essay must demonstrate knowledge of the subject and make coherent arguments'. For examp

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The problem with standardized testing isn't the test, but the tendency to "teach to the test". One of the best teachers I had in high school was my AP Chemistry teacher. Unlike other AP courses I took, we never saw an AP-style question until we took the exam. He taught chemistry and expected us to be able to handle the test format, not really worrying too much about precisely what chemistry would appear on the test. His students tended to do well on the AP exam.

        NCLB and related policies that highlight stand

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by khallow ( 566160 )

          The problem with standardized testing isn't the test, but the tendency to "teach to the test".

          The problem here is what would the schools and teachers that "teach to the test" do, if the test wasn't there? Answer: nothing. They have already demonstrated that they only do things, if there is some level of accountability attached to it. Now standardized tests may not be the best way to provide that accountability. But it's not the tests that are forcing teachers to do nothing else.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Mr.CRC ( 2330444 )

            Well then, there's no problem caused by top-down control and institutionalization that can't be fixed by more top-down control and institutionalization, eh?

      • Grade inflation happens and even in the same school one class might have a teacher that always scores higher than another.

        SO? Universities/etc. can still work out who knowns what using different methods, they just have to look at more than one single number; which ultimately leads to a better understanding of the individual, not less. Have you seen a study that compared the predictiveness of SATs to HS grades in college success, barbecue I have and HS grades won hands down.

        Loads of countries do not use any kind of standardized testing to normalize school marks, and they get along just fine.

        Add to that that we have had s

    • If the standardized testing providers do not trust the educators to administer the tests, there is no amount of law or security bells and whistles that can correct that problem. What roll does ethics of the test administrators and educators play?

    • You sound like a guy I had in my discussion section when I was TA'ing an intro Computer Science course. (Taught in Pascal). There were a handful of questions on one of our exams that asked the test-taker to write some code. He wrote his in C, because he never actually bothered to learn Pascal syntax. We gave him zero points. Guy was a third or fourth year E.E. student who was just taking the intro C.S .course to pad his GPA.

      Point being: your acquaintance's teacher would probably (can't say for sure)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )

        He wrote his in C, because he never actually bothered to learn Pascal syntax. We gave him zero points.

        Crap class anyway. All good classes only require pseudo-code. Discrete Math for programming class, all answers and projects could be written in any language, even made up ones, aka pseudo-code. Just be prepared to explain the Big-O of your code and the exact steps required for accomplish your code. Even my advanced C Algorithms class did not require C code for test taking, only projects that got handed in, because they needed to compile.

        There was an intro to programming class, which was technically a requ

        • We could have required only pseudocode on the exams, but if so then we would have had to "standardize" on a particular grammar of pseudocode or it would be near impossible to grade students' answers. You'd have students arguing about what their own peculiar version of pseudocode "means". So, since all the programming assignments were required to be done in Pascal, we just adopted "Pascal" as our pseudocode for the exams. We weren't picky about syntax unless a question was designed to test syntax. If you

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nkwe ( 604125 )

      Just yesterday I was chatting with a student in a programming class. She was complaining that she got in trouble for using language features that were "not taught yet" in the class. And this is exactly why the United States is falling behind in science and technology compared to other countries, because people are punished for self-education and innovation within our "education system"

      What if the point of the lesson was to solve the problem within a set of constraints? While I am not fond of our education system's apparent drive to the least common denominator, I don't think this example is a good one to support the argument of the United States "falling behind".

      For argument's sake, let's say that the lesson was to sort some data and the class had not yet covered the language's (or standard library) sort function. If the student used the built-in sort function instead of implementing th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      Just yesterday I was chatting with a student in a programming class. She was complaining that she got in trouble for using language features that were "not taught yet" in the class.

      That is sad. I did the same thing in junior high. We had a small unit in a computer apps class on programming in Basic. I did some research in the library to come up with idea for a group project program and ended up making a game. I used RND to randomize the outcome of a choice, a function that had never been covered in class. That and the fact the teacher could tell I wrote the whole game myself (since i was a lousy typist the other guys typed up what I'd handwritten) earned me a grade of 115% of the avai

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ncy ( 1164535 )

      Just yesterday I was chatting with a student in a programming class. She was complaining that she got in trouble for using language features that were "not taught yet" in the class. And this is exactly why the United States is falling behind in science and technology compared to other countries, because people are punished for self-education and innovation within our "education system"

      ^this!!! similar thing happened to me, where a question on an assignment wasn't clear so i took the wording literally and went out of my way to research how to answer it. even though the answer i put down was correct, because they didn't have it in their answer key, the TA marked it as wrong, and the head TA ignored me when i inquired what was so wrong about my answer. i wouldn't have had a problem if it was just some random exercise in class, but each assignment contributed a rather significant portion of

  • How is this new? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Ever seen tests run in China? India? MASSIVE cheating on an UNBELIEVABLE scale.

    Run Riot!

    • My son goes to a university for an engineering degree. He tells me the foreign students are absolutely stupid. The sad thing is the professors just push them through the program so the school can continue getting out of country money.

  • I'm sorry... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Netdoctor ( 95217 )

    ..why do we need the government regulating school tests?

    What are you going to do, bring little Johnny up on federal charges for cheating?

    • Re:I'm sorry... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Sunday October 05, 2014 @02:07AM (#48066825)
      Because without some form of regulation, some dickhead is going to start selling grades. Just like without regulation, you would end up being poisoned by the food you eat. If you don't believe me, just look at what's going on in China. There was a case last year where someone got caught recycling cooking oil from a sewer. Chinese with more money to spend by imports from Taiwan and Japan, since it is much less likely that they will get sick.

      I'm fed up with dolts like you. You live in a place where the government keeps your day to day life reasonably together, and then all do is whine. I hope your mother goes to a medical clinic where someone cheated on their grades, and she ends up dieing. Better her then me, or anyone I know. That is is only way a shithead like you will ever start paying attention.

      • That can be fixed by the testing agency having its own rules as a condition of taking the test and as a condition of administering the test. They can even set those conditions in a rather draconian manner. If an organization which is administering a test is caught cheating on the test, all scores ever taken through that organization are thrown out and the organization can no longer administer the test. This rule would need to only apply to tests taken after it was implemented.Obviously any one who took the


      • Because without some form of regulation, some dickhead is going to start selling grades. Just like without regulation, you would end up being poisoned by the food you eat.

        Ok, so AFAIK states have never had regulations about cheating in school. Schools themselves handle this. So by your statement, we should have rampant for-profit cheating going on RIGHT NOW. But yet I've never heard of that.

        How can you explain this lack of teachers selling grades on a mass scale?

      • Oh, and I'd also like to submit the idea that people such as yourself, who think that the solution to every problem is making a law are just as destructive as the people who think that the free market is going to control everything.

      • FYI: China has laws against recycling sewer oil. The solution isn't more regulation.

        I love how you wish harm upon those who disagree with your political opinions. Great way to show tolerance, there.

        "the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with."

        • "the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with."

          But ... but ... we didn't mean those opinions!

      • Just like without regulation, you would end up being poisoned by the food you eat.

        But libertarians keep telling me that you can just go to a different eating establishment the next time!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Mr.CRC ( 2330444 )

          You are engaging in deliberate intellectual dishonesty.

          Libertarians do not reject laws. Someone selling food made from non food-grade oil could simply be charged with the crime of fraud. If actual medical harm was done, then they could also be charged with reckless endangerment, or in the worst case that someone died, manslaughter.

          They would also be subject to civil lawsuit(s) for damages. In fact, such an act would warrant severe, most likely business liquidating damages just for the psychological str

      • Highlighting the problem doesn't magically make government the solution though. That's the fallacy of the false alternative. "You either favor a federal anti-cheating regime, or you don't care about cheating."

        I'm sure the feds would bring all the efficiency and efficacy to it that they've brought to the rest of education ... oops.

        Because without some form of regulation, some dickhead is going to start selling grades.

        Which never could happen with government at the helm, of course. Because human beings become angels when they go to work for government, and "corruption" is just some imaginary con

    • Because otherwise schools would have an incentive to cheat, or to take a lax attitude towards teaching, in order to inflate their grades. Or to go with an examination board that has a reputation for really easy questions, so any idiot can score an A.

    • We need to have the government regulating school tests so that they are a consistent standard, and people can rely on them as a measure of the student's ability.

  • Just speculating, but my guess is that cheating is illegal even without "codified regulations".

    • Back when I took exams - when the world was young and sheep were nervous - kids caught cheating were automatically failed and were in line for other sanctions as well, rather like doping in sport. Why the hell does a/the state need to get involved? An examination board is more likely to be able to keep up with newer ways of cheating than a state which has something codified and inflexible, an examination board is also more likely to be able to understand the subject than a collection of antagonistic lawye

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        This just saves time for the Universities. Cheating at any state Uni in my state will get you banned for life from the entire State Uni system. People with no skills or talent get quickly filtered by intro classes. Cheaters are just doing themselves a disservice, they'll rarely make it through a decent Uni.

  • While I applaud the effort they're making to prevent cheating on tests (especially by school staff), perhaps they should reconsider the root cause of it -- that by tying a school's resources to the results of a standardized test, they're encouraging the school to do anything possible to up the marks on the test. And I've yet to see any rules or policies making it illegal to waste class time by teaching for the test. They're wasting the youth's education and no one is calling them out on it.

    • ...tying a school's resources to the results of a standardized test, they're encouraging the school to do anything possible to up the marks on the test.

      Yes, heaven forbid any person or organization ever face any negative repercussions for underperforming. Hell, we should probably *reward* them with extra money for producing such poor results with the insane amount we gave them already.

      Don't become an apologist for unethical behavior. If a school is bad at educating students (its sole reason for existence), then it should be culled.

      Carrots alone are insufficient. The need for the stick exists as well.

      • I don't have a problem with the fact that there's consequences for a school failing to perform well. I have a problem with the fact that the design encourages poor quality education -- teaching for the test is a horrible thing to do to children. There should be a different measure for success (eg, measure the kids' scores on a test taken after school is over, such as the SAT, the acceptance rate of the students into quality universities, the average income of the students, etc) -- not only can these tests n

  • its not about memorizing useless bullshit that you will never need again, its about learning the material and how to quickly reference it in the real world

    the old notion that you will need to memorize to a perfect T something you will never use in your life is dead, just like the teachers in my day POUNDING the fact you wont have a calulator on you at all times .... meanwhile we have pocket super computers on our bodies 24/7

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      Basic math repetition is so annoying. 80/20 rule. Huge diminishing returns on extra practice. You should practice it enough to understand it, but nothing more. If you need to get better at doing it in your head, then it'll happen naturally when the time arises. I use math all the time, but I never do the calculations myself. Most of what I do is designing algorithms(programming), let the computer do the grunt work.

  • CB Exams are woeful security wise (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I run a lab of computers used for "high-risk examinations", things involving aerospace (The guys that fly big things above your heads or working on their parts). The security of the stock standard software that we must use (government provided) is awful, it's just Internet Explorer in a wrapper with a bunch of runtime modifications to explorer.exe to remove UI elements like the taskbar and crap. Seeing as we actually understand the threats involved, we have to provide additional security in order to prevent
  • If an institution has a policy of kicking out or otherwise punishing students who cheat then why bother getting the people in politics involved? Such laws are pointless so it doesn't matter if only a couple of states have them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by faedle ( 114018 )

      Oregonian here who follows the happenings in our state capital.

      IIRC the concern in Salem was institutionalized cheating: that is, a school district turning a blind eye to (or actively encouraging) cheating to improve scores. Without a law, there was no formal way to dictate a universal anti-cheating policy state-wide.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        Wouldn't existing laws for fraud solve that?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          Wouldn't existing laws for fraud solve that?

          I see what faedle is getting at. The laws place a burden on the institutions to prevent cheating. Fraud is a civil matter and requires the damaged party to come forward and complain. But if the institutions are complicit in cheating, or look the other way to boost the class average scores, they will hesitate to file charges.

          The initial reaction to a story about cheating is to think about those evil kids. But there's a significant problem with substandard or lazy teachers who try to shove their classes thro

    • To stop pushy parents suing the school/government

  • Rules may prohibit cheating and possibly reduce it. They definitely can't prevent it.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The real reason that teachers do not make "project" work a larger part of the grade is either because that is a lot more work for the teacher, or the subject is one which is really about acquiring a set of knowledge, not about acquiring a set of skills. I am sure there are schools which require that testing be a major component of the grade, but in every class I ever took, the teacher determined themselves how the grade was determined.

    • > Everyone knows plenty of smart people who are "terrible at taking tests." Yet often these people are able to run circles around those good at taking tests when it comes to applied work in class.

      At first I nodded my head in agreement, but then I started wondering- is that really true, or is that something said to avoid acknowledging that the person who consistently gets poor grades truly isn't that bright (or hasn't learned the material) . Thinking about people I know, there does seem to be a strong c

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        Smart people have a high rate of test anxiety and do not perform well under stress. Creativity in general is highly negatively affected by stress of any kind and creativity is typically associated with being "smart" by allowing you to think outside the box.

        • > smart people have a high rate of test anxiety

          I'm just curious if you have a citation for that. I would think that being unprepared and likely to fail would make someone nervous. I know that for me personally, I never worry about tests BECAUSE I know the material, so I know I'll pass. The main unknowns that affect my score are a) whether I mismark one question or two by hurrying through and b) how many wrong/nonsensical/ stupid questions there are. I don't worry precisely because I know the ma

    • Everyone knows plenty of smart people who are "terrible at taking tests."

      I don't.

      Based on my high school and college experience, I would say that the main reason why teachers avoid making project work the majority of a student's grade (at least 60%, it not over 75%) is that it's easier to make a class look good via testing.

      Tests are easier to mark. A project takes longer since you have to actually look at the deliverables. Also, you don't know who actually did it.

  • The Graduate Record Exams have been given on computers for a number of years. That's a serious blessing for the long essay portion of the test, especially for those of us who type faster than we can write longhand (and you can edit!). Do they have a problem with cheating? With students accessing the Internet?

  • These tests are no longer testing the most valuable skills of our students. Instead of making them take tests with both hands tied behind their backs, tests should be embracing the internet. It isn't cheating as long as you're not simply looking up the answers at a site that has cracked the test in some way. The best scientists, engineers, researchers, developers, etc. recognize what tasks need to be performed largely on their own and then perform them as efficiently and accurately as possible without break

  • I am pretty sure that cheating back in the day occurred fairly regularly, but I am willing to wager the farm that, relatively speaking, cheating on computer-based exams today is much easier than cheating back in the old days of pencil and paper. Just take for example the smart watch. It doesn't even have to be an iWatch or the android equivalent. In fact, for a cheater, it's even better if their devices were NOT the typical ones so that they don't set off the ever-watchful proctors. Watches with wifi enable

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