Category: DMN | Education

It’s the sort of case you might expect Encyclopedia Brown to tackle.

Two kids seem to have cheated on Professor Harpp’s final exam. Can he prove the culprits did it – before it’s too late?

But when McGill University professor David Harpp suspected some of his students were up to no good, he didn’t hire a boy detective for a shiny new quarter. He did the job himself.

He devised a statistical method to determine whether two students were copying test answers from each other. He found that, on a 98-question multiple-choice test, the pair of students had 97 answers exactly the same – including 23 wrong answers.

Confronted with the evidence, the students confessed.

To the untrained observer, it may seem strange that cheating can be reliably detected with statistics, formulas and math, as Texas officials have hired an outside firm to do. But decades of research around the world have produced methods that prove quite effective at smoking out cheaters in ways even the best proctors often can’t. […]

Read More… from Cheating: It’s in the numbers; Formulas can provide powerful evidence of misconduct on exams

Caveon, as a for-profit company, has declined to reveal how, exactly, it does its work.

“Companies don’t publish much about their methods, because then everyone could do it,” said Chris McManus, a professor of psychology and medical education at University College London who has researched cheating.

But Caveon’s report to state officials offers clues to how the company crunches its numbers.

It appears that, like many other cheating researchers, Caveon focuses on wrong answers, not correct ones. If two brilliant students both got perfect scores on the TAKS, Caveon wouldn’t consider that suspicious – even though, by definition, all their answers would be exactly the same.

An appendix to Caveon’s report says that the company calculates the probability that pairs of students would have the same answers if they had acted independently. That’s similar to a portion of the method used at Canada’s McGill University. But it’s unclear how similar two students’ answer sheets must be to trigger Caveon’s suspicion. […]

Read More… from SIDEBAR: Crunching numbers to find Texas cheats; Firm focuses on schools with high number of suspicious results

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 9A McGill University professor David Harpp has come up with one of the more straightforward statistical methods for teasing out cheaters. Here’s how he might catch two students, Jack and Jill, who are copying answers off each other on a 100-question multiple-choice exam. Let’s say both got C’s on […]

Read More… from SIDEBAR: How wrong answers point to wrongdoing

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1A The Texas Education Agency is leaning toward severing ties with the company it hired to look for cheating on the TAKS test, in part because the results have generated negative publicity for the state. The agency also has some concerns about some methods used by the company, Caveon, […]

Read More… from TEA may ax test analyzer; Agency doubts level of TAKS cheating; evaluator defends data

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1A All 699 schools suspected of cheating on the TAKS test will face a state investigation, the Texas Education Agency announced Monday. Sort of. The word “investigation” can have many meanings. For some schools, investigations could consist of little more than an exchange of letters. It remains to be […]

Read More… from Entire TAKS list faces inquiry; TEA: All 699 schools suspected of fraud to see some level of scrutiny

Of all the layers of silliness in the No Child Left Behind law, it’s hard to come up with any more poorly thought out than the “persistently dangerous schools” clause.

That’s the part of the law that is supposed to identify which schools are too scary and unsafe for kids to attend. If your school makes the list, it has to give you the chance to transfer to a safer school.

This year, five Texas schools were labeled persistently dangerous. Four are in the Valley, and I’ll admit I don’t know much about them. But the fifth one is a shocker: Cypress Ridge High School in Houston.

Cypress Ridge isn’t some gritty urban school with gangbangers roaming the halls. It’s a middle-class school in the suburbs.

It’s in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, the biggest suburban district in the state. The area has a lot of new growth; Cypress Ridge was built only four years ago and already has 3,500 students. Its test scores are usually better than the state average. If you want to imagine a Dallas-area high school for context, Cypress Ridge’s demographics are comparable to Newman Smith High in Carrollton.

So how did Cypress Ridge get labeled “persistently dangerous”? Was there a serial killer on the loose in AP Chemistry?

Nope. Just a few kids snagging pills from Dad’s medicine cabinet. […]

Read More… from Column: ‘Dangerous’ not always unsafe

Texas officials have released the names of 241 more schools with suspicious patterns in their test scores. But none are likely to be targeted in the upcoming round of state investigations into possible cheating.

The new list, released Friday, brings the total number of schools with suspicious scores to 699. That’s almost one-tenth of all the Texas schools that administered the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2005.

Earlier, the Texas Education Agency had released the names of only 442 schools that had at least one classroom with suspicious scores.

But Caveon – the test-security company the TEA hired to look for cheaters – also looked for schools that had suspicious score patterns schoolwide. Because of differences in the ways Caveon analyzed the scores, some schools were flagged as suspicious schoolwide without raising red flags in any specific classroom.

The TEA had not asked Caveon for the schoolwide list until The Dallas Morning News revealed its existence three weeks ago.

“We wanted to be able to look at all the schools as we think about how to move forward,” spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe said. […]

Read More… from TEA adds 241 schools with suspect scores; Campuses not likely to be part of inquiry into possible TAKS cheating

Ever wonder how hard the TAKS test really is? Twice each spring, Texas schools administer the exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills – the test students must pass in order to graduate from high school. (Once is for 11th graders; the other is for seniors who failed it the first time around.) Here are […]

Read More… from Test your TAKS knowledge with its toughest questions

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 3A State Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley has announced the members of her new task force on test security. The five members will oversee the upcoming investigations of Texas schools suspected of cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2005. Caveon, a Utah-based company hired by the […]

Read More… from TAKS panel members are in place

Calling the prevention of cheating “our highest priority,” the Texas Education Agency is tripling its number of investigators and preparing inquiries of the schools where test scores are the most suspicious.

The agency will also create an independent task force to oversee the investigations, which will begin in September. But it’s still unknown how many schools will be investigated.

“The Texas Education Agency is taking this matter very seriously,” Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley wrote in a letter to all district superintendents Friday.

The moves are in response to a report released in May by Caveon, a Utah test-security firm. TEA hired Caveon to analyze scores on the 2005 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and determine if any students or educators were cheating.

Caveon flagged more than 600 schools for a variety of suspect test patterns: students who seemed to get too smart too fast, score sheets with too many erasures or classrooms where too many students had suspiciously similar answers.

“I think we have to restore the public’s faith in our testing system,” Dr. Neeley said in an interview. […]

Read More… from TAKS inquiry gets a boost; TEA adds investigators and task force for cheating probe