Teaching for the Future: August 2007

Part 1: Introduction:

The point of new technology is to make tasks easier. Computers replace typewriters, which replaced the printing press, which replaced the monastery of monks illuminating Bibles. But there ease goes too far and our actions become cheating? As teachers, educators, administrators, and parents it is part of our job to draw these lines in our communities, schools, and classrooms. Today we are going to focus on how the way we cheat is changing because of our new technology and our new found connectivity.

Part 2: Cheating in the Media

Cheating from bible.ca From the Site: "The world in which young people live makes it so easy to be dishonest in regard to truth. Think how easy it is to cheat on examinations in school. In fact, we see so much cheating that we must be careful lest cheating appears to be normal to us. It is easy to believe that everyone does it, so why should not we? When we get involved in real-life situations, and under pressure during an exam, or meeting a deadline, it is not so easy to think as clearly as we should."

Norms of the Classroom.
Well Designed Assessment.
Clear Guidelines.

Cheating on standardized tests isn't fleeting -- it's predictable: Cheating in schools has always been a problem, but the pressure of high stakes testing may be part of the problem in one school in California. From the article:"Donald Campbell, an eminent social scientist, warned about the danger of measuring effectiveness by a single influential metric. The more any quantitative indicator is used for decision-making, he said, the more subject it will be to corruption and the more it will corrupt the very process it is intended to monitor." (Gardner 2007)

Oakland charter school director resigns amid cheating scandal: Isaac Haqq has resigned from his position as the head of the University Preparatory Charter Academy in Oakland, CA amid allegations of cheating and changing academics records.

From the article: "Not long after Ward's decision, state department of education officials began looking into a suspicious pattern of erasures on the school's 2006 standardized tests. Staff has since determined that adult tampering did take place, and has invalidated the scores, said Bill Padia, deputy superintendent for assessment and accountability for the California Department of Education.

This year, Padia said, investigators found 2005 algebra and geometry test booklets at the school — a major security breach. As a result, he said, Uprep's standardized test scores for 2007 will be invalidated as well."

Superintendent’s Speech Stirs Talk of Plagiarism From TftF 76: The now former Superintendent of Schools in Fort Lee, NJ was caught stealing her speech to the National Honors Society. Not only did she swipe her speech from the web, but she swiped it from About.com. To many of you this may be evidence of how easy it is for students to steal and plagiarize from the web, but all I can think about is how any high school student worth his or her salt would have at least changed some of the speech.

Poll: Tougher catching cheating with online test takers, educators say

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