6 ms·

Eh, I commiserate with the author, and experienced some of the same in American public school. However, this part of the article really stood out to me, as I co

Eh, I commiserate with the author, and experienced some of the same in American public school. However, this part of the article really stood out to me, as I couldn't imagine it happening in any of my school environments (which were not optimal by any means): > There were many ways in which the school and teachers gamed the system to boost their measured performance. One way was to do exams for students. I was on a bottom set language class for French. After two years I literally couldn’t speak a single sentence in french and maybe knew 20 words in total. I still passed my exams. How? We did the tests in class. Often the teacher would go through them with us. Literally giving us the test and then going through each question on the whiteboard and telling us what to write. A different year and a different teacher, this time the teacher would sit next to us and write the answers down. Could this behavior by teachers really be widespread??? I think this is just an anomaly of the author's school. Any of my teachers would've been wary of behaving like this. Kids don't keep such things quiet! I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools.

jimbob45 6y ago
In my experience, this kind of thing happened more in lower-tier classes than upper-tier ones. Lower-quality teachers might have less compunction over cheating than their upper-quality counterparts and often get the non-AP/IB classes due to their qualifications.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Perhaps, though I don't think that's the case in this article: > ... I was mostly in top ability streamed classes, meaning my classroom experience was likely far better than average.
  - syrrim 6y ago
    The french classes, where the exam cheating took place, were specifically described as lower tier.
retsibsi 6y ago
If the people further up the chain have similar incentives (higher scores = we've all done a great job), and most students are either benefiting from the cheating or being harmed by it in only a fairly minor indirect way, it's plausible to me that nobody would want to stick their neck out and make enough of a fuss to change things. I've never seen anything this egregious, but in my own experience people are usually willing to go along with systems that don't make sense (according to their ostensible purpose) and aren't very fair, if that's what everyone else is doing and there's no personal gain to be had by rocking the boat.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Yes, you make a good point. But there's another factor that I think makes this untenable, at least in the US — the widespread use of well-proctored standardized tests. Very hard to cheat on those.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    I attended high school with a person whose mother pretended to be a guidance counselor, and was able to obtain a copy of the SAT test weeks before her daughter took the test. She graduated from Harvard. The mom got 24 months probation, 200 hours of community service, and had to pay $15k in restitution. Also “Operation Varsity Blues” revealed it is indeed possible to bypass ‘well-proctored’ protections.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      Very different situation though. A school can't game its stats year after year using measures like this, because they will be caught. From your references, it seems even in isolated cases there's punishment. In larger scales, like that of a whole classroom, subversion of the system is near impossible.
      - daniellarusso 6y ago
        My thought is that there are a number of parents who would say that the punishment is worth it if you can get your child into a top-tier university (based on my first reference - the parent spent no jail time away).
jokethrowaway 6y ago
I wonder if the kids are not aware this is a test submitted. I remember doing "class exercises" which were collected and had much less security (around copying, cheating) than normal tests.
dash2 6y ago
Welcome to Britain :-(
matsemann 6y ago
On national tests in Norway I've never heard this occur. What they do instead is to ask the weaker pupils not to attend that day to increase the average score.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Similar shenanigans happened in California during the brief period of rating schools by student's test scores. The tests were not annual, so poor performers would repeat a grade the year before the test. Then schools were rated lower for having kids repeat grades. They did the encouraging poor performers to be absent on test day thing as well, so the state subtracted points for poor attendance and had a second day for kids who missed the first. On top of this, anecdotally it seemed that the marginal schools were made worse because they would spend time teaching to the test, while the higher performing schools didn't feel compelled to do that. There are still knock-on effects today after having stopped that. Our daughter has been consistently behind by 1-1.5 years in assessment testing in every subject from grades 1-6. It took years of fighting to get her retained. An actual conversation ended with the person we were talking to admitting that the best thing for both the school and our daughter would be to retain her, and that the only reason they were refusing was because "it is against policy for us to retain any student for any reason other than a long-term absence" Fortunately once that was said out loud we made progress through the system again. Prior to that there was all sorts of apologia for the policy, and how retaining our daughter would cause irreparable damage to her psyche; as if her knowing she was the "dumb kid" and having entire lessons go completely over her head was not at all damaging...
- fma 6y ago
  In my state, they report the number of students who took the state test for each school as a percentage of population. I would be suspicious of any school that doesn't have over 98% take. Yeah they can have a few kids not take it, but the overall score still is impacted by 98%.
speeder 6y ago
What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated) I noticed then that several governments to please the UN (and get their precious IMF money and whatnot) will then game the stats as needed. I am from Brazil, here the public schools after UN meddling got in the picture first went the route OP said, but the UN didn't rated the country education based on scores, but based on dropouts, the more dropouts you have the worse your score is. So solution is not have dropouts! Cue government doing two things: 1. Banning any possible form of homeschooling. 2. Making a law where you can't fail a kid, even if the kid is completely retarded and just drools all day, as long the kid in question can write their own name (even if they don't understand the meaning or treat it just as a drawing), they will pass... 3. Convince the population that avoiding dropouts is important, the government regularly runs massive marketing programs (doesn't even matter if government is left or right) saying how important it is for kids to finish school, and how great it is that now that they can't fail, they don't drop out.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated) Can you post a link to this human rights document please?
  - speeder 6y ago
    https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ As for what I am talking about, read Article 26. I will quote the relevant phraseS (not the whole article) for brevity: "Elementary education shall be compulsory" and "Education shall ... tons of stuff ... and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace." And this is reinforced elsewhere. "Article 29.3: These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." "Article 30: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein." And just to explain why I said Brazil went with the cheating route after UN meddling: Until around 1970s, Brazil didn't need the IMF or anything like that, thus it was ignoring the UN regarding certain subjects, among them it was that then the approach to public schooling was that the purpose of the public school was the education of brilliant students, and those that didn't want to be there shouldn't be there, so bad students, bullies, etc... were outright kicked out.
notahacker 6y ago
One of my old school teachers (ordinary UK comprehensive) was fired for doing German speaking tests one on one with some helpful phrases written on the board in the background.
mr_gibbins 6y ago
In my maths GCSE (UK) one of the teachers observed I was having some trouble expanding brackets and whispered a mnemonic she had taught us weeks previously to help. One data point, one observation... but yes, I can believe it.
- nobrains 6y ago
  But isn't that also good teaching / learning happening right there?
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    During the administration of a national exam?
klyrs 6y ago
I took a class at a community college and the teacher did this with take home exams. I never did understand why
asciimike 6y ago
I've seen a few variations on this that are less blatant but equally effective at gaming the system. Note that these all happened in college, rather than in HS--I never recall seeing this in high school. The first is professors providing previous exams for students to study from, and then only changing the numbers, not the questions (e.g. the test is a template). This wasn't the norm, but it wasn't uncommon either--several professors gained nicknames to this effect, and you knew if you were in one of their classes how everything was going to work. Even if the professor didn't provide the exam, fraternities and sororities usually kept prior exams from folks who had done well, and I believe the "learning center" also would keep copies, to the point where I am occasionally recognized when I come back to campus (mostly for recruiting) because one of my completed computer architecture tests has been given out as reference for the past decade. The second is providing study sessions the day/night before an exam where professors would run through common scenarios that might appear on tests. When done correctly, students would ask the questions and the prof would get another student to demonstrate and they would help as necessary--when done poorly (and unfortunately, in my experience, the more common of the two), it devolved to the first scenario. Neither are explicitly "cheating" in the way outlined in the parent (I don't know if they'd show up on accreditation, for instance), but they achieve the same end result. As a bonus, I worked as a proctor in the learning center for a year or two, and while the majority of students came in because they were legitimately struggling with one concept and needed tutoring to jump the knowledge gap, there was a core group of frequent fliers who were there every day basically getting their homework done by others, and thus boosting overall grades (and ultimately graduation rate). As has been stated many, many times in this thread, incentives (staying accredited, getting some arbitrary US News and World Reports ranking, having a high graduation/job placement rate, etc.) push this behavior to the detriment of student learning.
CivBase 6y ago
> I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools. Bold of you to assume the prime directive of most schools is to teach kids.
rvba 6y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/c822qx/of_people_aged_15_30_who_say_they_can_read_write/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/c822qx/of_people_ag...

jimbob45 6y ago

In my experience, this kind of thing happened more in lower-tier classes than upper-tier ones. Lower-quality teachers might have less compunction over cheating than their upper-quality counterparts and often get the non-AP/IB classes due to their qualifications.

sebmellen 6y ago
Perhaps, though I don't think that's the case in this article: > ... I was mostly in top ability streamed classes, meaning my classroom experience was likely far better than average.
- syrrim 6y ago
  The french classes, where the exam cheating took place, were specifically described as lower tier.

retsibsi 6y ago

If the people further up the chain have similar incentives (higher scores = we've all done a great job), and most students are either benefiting from the cheating or being harmed by it in only a fairly minor indirect way, it's plausible to me that nobody would want to stick their neck out and make enough of a fuss to change things. I've never seen anything this egregious, but in my own experience people are usually willing to go along with systems that don't make sense (according to their ostensible purpose) and aren't very fair, if that's what everyone else is doing and there's no personal gain to be had by rocking the boat.

sebmellen 6y ago
Yes, you make a good point. But there's another factor that I think makes this untenable, at least in the US — the widespread use of well-proctored standardized tests. Very hard to cheat on those.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  I attended high school with a person whose mother pretended to be a guidance counselor, and was able to obtain a copy of the SAT test weeks before her daughter took the test. She graduated from Harvard. The mom got 24 months probation, 200 hours of community service, and had to pay $15k in restitution. Also “Operation Varsity Blues” revealed it is indeed possible to bypass ‘well-proctored’ protections.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Very different situation though. A school can't game its stats year after year using measures like this, because they will be caught. From your references, it seems even in isolated cases there's punishment. In larger scales, like that of a whole classroom, subversion of the system is near impossible.
    - daniellarusso 6y ago
      My thought is that there are a number of parents who would say that the punishment is worth it if you can get your child into a top-tier university (based on my first reference - the parent spent no jail time away).

jokethrowaway 6y ago

I wonder if the kids are not aware this is a test submitted. I remember doing "class exercises" which were collected and had much less security (around copying, cheating) than normal tests.

dash2 6y ago

Welcome to Britain :-(

matsemann 6y ago

On national tests in Norway I've never heard this occur. What they do instead is to ask the weaker pupils not to attend that day to increase the average score.

aidenn0 6y ago
Similar shenanigans happened in California during the brief period of rating schools by student's test scores. The tests were not annual, so poor performers would repeat a grade the year before the test. Then schools were rated lower for having kids repeat grades. They did the encouraging poor performers to be absent on test day thing as well, so the state subtracted points for poor attendance and had a second day for kids who missed the first. On top of this, anecdotally it seemed that the marginal schools were made worse because they would spend time teaching to the test, while the higher performing schools didn't feel compelled to do that. There are still knock-on effects today after having stopped that. Our daughter has been consistently behind by 1-1.5 years in assessment testing in every subject from grades 1-6. It took years of fighting to get her retained. An actual conversation ended with the person we were talking to admitting that the best thing for both the school and our daughter would be to retain her, and that the only reason they were refusing was because "it is against policy for us to retain any student for any reason other than a long-term absence" Fortunately once that was said out loud we made progress through the system again. Prior to that there was all sorts of apologia for the policy, and how retaining our daughter would cause irreparable damage to her psyche; as if her knowing she was the "dumb kid" and having entire lessons go completely over her head was not at all damaging...
fma 6y ago
In my state, they report the number of students who took the state test for each school as a percentage of population. I would be suspicious of any school that doesn't have over 98% take. Yeah they can have a few kids not take it, but the overall score still is impacted by 98%.

speeder 6y ago

What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated) I noticed then that several governments to please the UN (and get their precious IMF money and whatnot) will then game the stats as needed. I am from Brazil, here the public schools after UN meddling got in the picture first went the route OP said, but the UN didn't rated the country education based on scores, but based on dropouts, the more dropouts you have the worse your score is. So solution is not have dropouts! Cue government doing two things: 1. Banning any possible form of homeschooling. 2. Making a law where you can't fail a kid, even if the kid is completely retarded and just drools all day, as long the kid in question can write their own name (even if they don't understand the meaning or treat it just as a drawing), they will pass... 3. Convince the population that avoiding dropouts is important, the government regularly runs massive marketing programs (doesn't even matter if government is left or right) saying how important it is for kids to finish school, and how great it is that now that they can't fail, they don't drop out.

DanBC 6y ago
> What I think is a major issue is that the UN "human rights" document says that schooling is mandatory and must teach about the UN (yep! it is a "human right" to be indoctrinated) Can you post a link to this human rights document please?
- speeder 6y ago
  https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ As for what I am talking about, read Article 26. I will quote the relevant phraseS (not the whole article) for brevity: "Elementary education shall be compulsory" and "Education shall ... tons of stuff ... and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace." And this is reinforced elsewhere. "Article 29.3: These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." "Article 30: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein." And just to explain why I said Brazil went with the cheating route after UN meddling: Until around 1970s, Brazil didn't need the IMF or anything like that, thus it was ignoring the UN regarding certain subjects, among them it was that then the approach to public schooling was that the purpose of the public school was the education of brilliant students, and those that didn't want to be there shouldn't be there, so bad students, bullies, etc... were outright kicked out.

notahacker 6y ago

One of my old school teachers (ordinary UK comprehensive) was fired for doing German speaking tests one on one with some helpful phrases written on the board in the background.

mr_gibbins 6y ago

In my maths GCSE (UK) one of the teachers observed I was having some trouble expanding brackets and whispered a mnemonic she had taught us weeks previously to help. One data point, one observation... but yes, I can believe it.

nobrains 6y ago
But isn't that also good teaching / learning happening right there?
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  During the administration of a national exam?

klyrs 6y ago

I took a class at a community college and the teacher did this with take home exams. I never did understand why

asciimike 6y ago

I've seen a few variations on this that are less blatant but equally effective at gaming the system. Note that these all happened in college, rather than in HS--I never recall seeing this in high school. The first is professors providing previous exams for students to study from, and then only changing the numbers, not the questions (e.g. the test is a template). This wasn't the norm, but it wasn't uncommon either--several professors gained nicknames to this effect, and you knew if you were in one of their classes how everything was going to work. Even if the professor didn't provide the exam, fraternities and sororities usually kept prior exams from folks who had done well, and I believe the "learning center" also would keep copies, to the point where I am occasionally recognized when I come back to campus (mostly for recruiting) because one of my completed computer architecture tests has been given out as reference for the past decade. The second is providing study sessions the day/night before an exam where professors would run through common scenarios that might appear on tests. When done correctly, students would ask the questions and the prof would get another student to demonstrate and they would help as necessary--when done poorly (and unfortunately, in my experience, the more common of the two), it devolved to the first scenario. Neither are explicitly "cheating" in the way outlined in the parent (I don't know if they'd show up on accreditation, for instance), but they achieve the same end result. As a bonus, I worked as a proctor in the learning center for a year or two, and while the majority of students came in because they were legitimately struggling with one concept and needed tutoring to jump the knowledge gap, there was a core group of frequent fliers who were there every day basically getting their homework done by others, and thus boosting overall grades (and ultimately graduation rate). As has been stated many, many times in this thread, incentives (staying accredited, getting some arbitrary US News and World Reports ranking, having a high graduation/job placement rate, etc.) push this behavior to the detriment of student learning.

CivBase 6y ago

> I'm sure this behavior would be quickly reprimanded by administrators or other teachers in my past schools. Bold of you to assume the prime directive of most schools is to teach kids.

rvba 6y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/c822qx/of_people_aged_15_30_who_say_they_can_read_write/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/c822qx/of_people_ag...