Avoiding a repeat of Pineapple-gate
A letter from a New Jersey Superintendent started making the rounds on Friday. The letter included the following:
- An alert by the state department of education, late at night, that there had been a “test security” breach.
- An inaccurate allegation by the state official that a picture of a test question had been posted on Twitter by the student.
- A request that that the student be disciplined (suspended).
- This involved input from the test publisher, Pearson.
The tweet apparently did not include a picture, and was after the day’s testing ended. It started on Bob Braun’s Ledger website, which has been crashing since, either due to large amounts of traffic, or a DNS attack, depending on who you read. Either scenario says something about how explosive this issue is.
In my humble opinion, this is not spying by Pearson, because when this student put it up in social media it’s public. But there is something more disturbing about this because at the heart, it’s a free speech issue and the clash with intellectual property. These tests involve a lot of money. A lot of money to hire psychometricians to write the questions. A lot of money to test publishers from the states and localities to pay for the tests, etc. These questions are precious intellectual property for the publishers. They lose value the more “public” they become, so they loathe sharing on social media. They talk about “cheating” really, they worry about questions becoming dead because they’ve been all over the Internets and then can’t be used any more. Audrey Watters and Cynthia Liu have made this point too, I’m going to guess we all had this brilliant insight at once. but here are Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Avoiding a repeat of Pineapple-gate: