States Search For Answers To Cheating Scandals
Cheating scandals have rocked a number of school districts across the country this year. The publicity is pushing states to look for better ways to detect and prevent tampering with the test results, and some say constant vigilance is required to guard against cheating.
What happened in Atlanta is hard to imagine: Dozens of administrators and teachers apparently conspired to change answers on standardized tests. When those tests showed big gains, school leaders took the credit. But they were caught, in part, because Georgia investigators have been looking for signs of tampering for years.
Kathleen Mathers, who runs Georgia's Office of Student Achievement, says her state is in its third year of using erasure analysis of all elementary and middle school tests. Mathers says that
