Our society has changed. In an age where information was difficult to attain, information memorization and regurgitation was important so tests were designed to meet that need. Now, with such easy access to information, tests that evaluate information attainment are both irrevelant and outdated. With any piece of information available on-demand, assessments and evaluations need to be skills-based, not information-based.
The most authentic and rewarding assessments in courses I have either taken or taught - involved a chance to creatively and thoughtfully apply skills and knowledge to a meaningful and engaging issue.
I fear a number of educators are still too afraid to let get of the mantra from the Beatles song Across the Universe, “nothing’s gonna change my world”.
Asking a question on your blog is one way to open an discussion, and though we’re posting the content of this blog entry, it’s still an important topic to consider. My personal preference is to consider the question:
What types of tests are relevant?
If a test is going to be similar to a real world experience, then the most relevant test should have the following characteristics:
1] The test should allow students access to any information system available (the Internet; Wikipedia; news sources; personal networks…).
2] The test should demand that students ‘apply information’ to a context or situation, rather than simply restate ‘learned’ facts.
3] The test should offer students a range of ways to respond (the written word; audio recording; product dev’t; physical demonstration…).
A ‘test’ of this type is more likely a ‘performance task’; and although this type of test wouldn’t be easy to administer, it would provide the truest test of one’s learning. Thank goodness we don’t provide driver’s licenses, pilot’s licenses, or dental licenses on the basis of the written test!
If we make tests that you can’t cheat on, then there’s no right or wrong answer. The idea of grading only assignments that could be considered subjective are scary for several reasons.
1) Time it takes to grade.
2) Parents. A subjective assignment/grade is just asking for parents to criticize/call out a teacher for favoritism or dislike.
3) Consistency. Grading things anything subjective can vary greatly from one test/paper to another, depending on mood, surroundings, time of day, etc. Anyone who says it doesn’t is lying.
While I definitely agree and would hate to see any of these three be obstacles to true and authentic assessment, I think they are some of the reasons why teachers resist.
A good rubric can help grade the important assessments that kids cannot cheat on. Sure, you’ll have basic assignments you’ll grade like always, but for important assessments, a rubric guided “test” can answer all those questions you have.
Get rid of grades and that takes care of #2 and #3 and rolls them into a changed #1: Time it takes to assess where a student is at and then figure out what they need to help them progress. And that would be a pretty good description of our jobs, wouldn’t it?
After working in alternative ed for a number of years I think the question is:
When are students going to stop caring about the results of assessments that are not authentic and meaningful?
As Rob De Lorenzo points out, today memorization of facts are not all that important when with a couple of key strokes all information of this type is at your fingertips. So, an even better question to ask is:
When will employers, college admissions, and other factors of the “real world” stop caring about the results of assessments that do not measure how a student is able to apply information?
I’m confused by the question - you mean kids actually cheat? With joking aside…my real answer is, when we as educators begin to THINK OUTSIDE THE TEST BOX, then and only then will cheating be obsolete.
I second that amen. I also agree that educators must think outside the box. Give students projects that require them to use their technological skills to gather the answer. Gone should be the paper and pencil test. Students should be doing while learning. It is no fun have a teacher talking at for 90 minutes or even 45 minutes. There are so many tools available for free and pay that we as educators can reinvent the way assessment is done. At the end of the class what do we want the students to get out of the information presented to them?
What about the students being held accountable? All the responsibility should not fall on the teacher to create a “cheat-proof” test.
I have to disagree with Rob that tests that evaluate information attainment are irrelevant. Perhaps many of those tests are irrelevant but not all.
I think E.D. Hirsch is correct that all students need some core knowledge, even if the information is readily available. I feel like we’re instilling an attitude in our students that you don’t need to know anything because you can just look it up online.
Well, yeah, people need to know not to eat certain berries they find in the wild or that some snakes are poisonous. Basic laws of physics and understanding of algebra might also be necessary but can’t anything that is truly necessary knowledge be assessed in a context of application?
There definiately needs to be a core knowledge- It’ll act as a starting point of our search engine query or our blog post or a twitter query or whatever. We need to know something for us to build our knowledge upon.
I would agree wholeheartedly. If we follow this slippery slope to its end, we will have students who “know” nothing unless they have an internet connection. But, perhaps that core of knowledge is shifting somewhat?
I agree. I’m reminded of the National Lampoon’s European Vacation movie when Chevy Chase tries to order in French. He has all the words right on the little translator, but can’t put it together correctly.
Common knowledge is just that…common knowledge. Stuff that everyone should know without having to look it up. Stuff like the order of the Presidents of the US is important if you’re going on Jeopardy or if you want to impress people at a party, but is it necessary to memorize it?
I also agree that rubrics help out with subjective grading, but they never truly assess all the components of every child’s product. It still winds up being either too standardized or too vague to accomplish the objective.
You could have stopped at “When are we going to stop giving kids tests…?”
I just read an article at Higher Learning about a prof that walked out if a student used text messaging during a lecture. This prof interpreted the activity as disrespectful , which is a bit of a stretch.
In the comments a number of people reported that they gave pop quizzes to the whole class a punishment for “disruptive” behavior. The message is “tests are not to enhance learning, they are social control, forced compliance punitive.” Effective for some purposes perhaps (police state) but hardly higher learning.
Tests also establish a rank and reduce our students to numbers. Do we really need this kind of competition in learning? They take what is often intrinsically motivating (learning new cool stuff) and reduce it to a chore done for extrinsic purposes (we have to learn this or we will get a bad grade).
Grades really are arbitrary anyway, and they aren’t exactly the best predictors for future achievement. So, not to answer your question with a question, but what exactly do they (students) get out of cheating?
They get a better grade, acceptance to a better school, out of having to memorize facts(which they find absolutely pointless most of the time), and the thrill of risk taking. Many of them also get to avoid having to come to uncomfortable conflict or self admission of learning differences or disabilities. Another product I believe of our extrinsic heavy status quo system of schooling that values individual achievement ahead of collaborative knowledge construction and punishes those not equally equipped to play the game of school where instead of fostering each child’s strengths.
Cheating actually sounds like a great idea. Sometimes I think we should reward those who are good at it.
I like your final thought. Perhaps effective cheating could be interpreted as “creative problem solving”. I would imagine that some pretty elaborate systems for cheating have been developed by some pretty bright individuals!!! Those students are the real innovators.
Who ever said that test grades had to come from tests? What about projects? (And not the poster project or anything of the same ilk.) What about test grades based on participation/discussion? Anything that is evaluative can be a test grade. We need to stop thinking that means a piece of paper.
So many good comments that make you go “hmmmm”! There are many valid points and I am trying to let them all sink in. I am not sure there is a good concrete answer to that question right now but there should be many trials (”tests”…hah!) that should be taking place to answer this question.
I’m an orchestra director. When students come to play scales tests or tests on their concert repertoire, there’s no possible way to cheat. They either play the music correctly, or not (I do use a rubric to catch all the in-betweens).
It’s funny that you bring this up during our PSSA testing window (or coincidence?), and I’d be curious to see how many students cheat on those tests as opposed to the regularly given tests on class content.
I’m the wrong guy for an answer, but I’m definitely interested in the discussion.
I would agree that you can’t get more authentic than performance-based assessment. It is used in music, in art, in sports - and somehow in the core education content areas, “performance-based” has gotten translated into performance on tests rather than on real tasks. Tests are easer. Tests fit in to an assembly-line, automated teach-to-the-masses form of education.
Kids will stop cheating when assessment becomes a tool and a grade can’t be used as a weapon.
Kids will stop cheating when adults (like professional baseball players who resort to injection of substances to enhance performance!) model ethical behavior
Kids will stop cheating when adults model accepting of their fate and owning up to actions, like not using a PBA card or a lame excuse to get out of a ticket when they know they have been speeding.
Kids will stop cheating when a GPA and class rank are eliminated.
Kids will stop cheating when they are prepared well enough that everyone can be highly proficient because they were taught and learned at the highest levels.
or
Kids will stop cheating when the standards are lowered enough that everyone succeeds without having to do any effort.
Awesome response Barry. I need to do some freewriting again! That assessments really have become weapons or levers is a sad commentary on where we are at.
I couldn’t agree more. If a student truly understands the information there should be no reason to cheat on an exam. However as long as we have students that are not learning at the pace and level that has been deemed appropriate in conjunction with the schools having to meet exam criteria there will be cheating.
Benjamin,
I believe authentic assessment can help to “test” application of one’s knowledge/thinking better than other types of assessment (especially tests).
I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that there needs to be a core knowledge - and will go one step further and say that different sorts of disciplines / career paths require different sorts of core knowledge.
To say that, “well, you can always look it up online,” won’t make me feel very confident when I’m in the operating room and I see the surgeon go to google and look up the operation as I slip into unconsciousness. I would really prefer that they KNOW how to perform the operation and have demonstrated that proficiency to someone who is qualified to evaluate it. Hmmm. For that matter, I’d also like them to be able to identify the parts of the body that they are operating - while rote knowledge, I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
I’d like the person who flies my plane to know how to operate the controls without a manual. I’d like the engineer that designs the bridge I drive across to have a good understanding of civil engineering so that I can be assured the design is reasonably sound.
This requires a core knowledge and a set of basic facts and skills. Even for us to be able to write these comments, someone had to drill us on spelling and grammar so that we learned how to write well.
Isn’t the real problem how we convince students to learn these skill sets well without testing them? The test, paper, or project (all of which can be cheated on) provides the “deadline” to learn. How many of us submit that paper to a journal, write that memo for the meeting, or turn in that assessment report without a deadline?
I fervently hope that the onset of some of this great new technology will allow us to be more flexible in our approach to education (less of a one-test-fits-all-students model) and more of a learn-it-until-you-understand-it-and-can-demonstrate-it model.
Personally, I can’t wait until the day when I can stop grading math tests. Speaking of which …
Well, I imagine that most of us here do all of those things without a deadline, since I’m pretty sure reading and commenting here wasn’t an assignment and didn’t have a due date. So perhaps part of the question is what’s different about this for us, and how do we transfer that to our students?
What is different is that we are adults and are motivated by concepts such as self-enhancement, comraderie, and a need to feel like we are making a difference. Students, while they may want to enhance their situation in the social make-up of their groups through comraderie, haven’t acquired the maturity and discipline to seek this type of dialogue. At least, most of the students I have met have not reached this point.
I’m sure the argument will be that the school system forced them to seek instant gratification instead of deliberation and self-discipline through its use of the “pass or fail” mentality.
Face it, education today struggles to compete against celebrity status and pubescent debauchery. It has always been that way…Elvis, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Bon Jovi, N’Sync, Britney Spears, and Hannah Montana.
I know this doesn’t answer the question, but students are going to cheat because they don’t care about the knowledge. They don’t see it as important. They can’t see the long-term view. And with our media saturated, attention deficit disordered world, who can blame them?
@Chris Edge - I think students are capable of more than we think. Certainly many students at my high school show glimpes of this when given the opportunity. And, yes, I do think we’ve somewhat trained them to be the way they are. Does that mean they will approach situations the same way adults do? No, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strive for that and restructure our approaches to encourage that.
I think the fundamental difference is that we are commenting here because it is a topic of interest to us. I suspect our students are willingly commenting on their friends’ myspace and facebook pages in a similar fashion because it’s of interest to them.
We need students to learn a little bit of everything. Given their individual interests, they are not going to LIKE everything we need to teach them, regardless of how good the instruction is.
Now, if the response is that we don’t need to teach them a core set of skills, then we don’t need an educational system. We could just hook students into the Internet and hope that they find something productive to do with their time.
I’m sure there are activites that we (as adults) have to do that we would not do without a deadline. The looming date of April 15th comes to mind … and is it kind of a form of cheating to have an accountant do your taxes for you?
I think we can do a much better job of engaging students, of investigating topics of both importance and interest. Yes, we won’t ever get to 100% engagement and interest, but we can do better at showing them the relevance and meaning in what we’re asking them to do, and allowing them as much as possible to relate it to their interests and “likes.”
As far as taxes go, it is amazing how many folks in the U.S. “outsource” that to someone else. So is preparing your taxes a “core skill?”
I agree that there’s a certain level of knowledge that you need to know. But I bet we’d draw the “essential” line in different places. I just wanted to chime in on the “drill us on spelling and grammar” point. Totally off topic - but we don’t learn how to write by taking spelling tests and punctuating random sentences. We learn to write by practicing how to write. Turns out that drilling, be it in spelling or in grammar, actually has zero impact on future performance. George Hillocks did a great study on grammar instruction a while back - I’m projecting those results for spelling.
Oh - and the same is true for surgeons - they didn’t learn to do surgery well by reading about it. They practiced. Same with engineers - they built little bridges first.
I’m thinking more and more, or maybe I’ve always felt this way, and couldn’t articulate it, that school should be about habit formation - but good, critical learning habits, not the habits that most institutions are actually teaching. Habits like crap detection. Asking questions. Writing for understanding. Reading. Thinking. Experimenting. Good teachers promote these things - in spite of their schools.
I agree on the grammar and spelling, although I don’t have the research to back it up. Note that I’m not saying grammar and spelling aren’t important (I feel like I’ve had this discussion about 5 times in my school), but that they are important in the context of communicating. And therefore I agree with Bud that they get better at writing/communicating by doing more writing/communicating and then receiving timely, relevant and meaningful feedback (which might include some grammar and spelling instruction). And that feedback - that assessment - doesn’t need a grade attached and rarely would be something they could “cheat” at.
Bud, I think you are getting at my question. We talk a lot in my school about having students “do” math and “do” science and “do” language arts, as opposed to simply learning about science or math or language arts that others have done. Again, I’m not saying they don’t need to learn about what others have done, but that shouldn’t be all they’re learning, and too often in our current school climate that is the case.
The research is out there. Of course, many of authors that I’d like to link you to here are stuck in journal silos that require subscriptions or a trip to the library. I’d encourage you to seek out George Hillocks, Jr., and look at his 1986/1987 meta-analysis of writing instruction. It was published in the May 1987 issue of _Educational Leadership._ Here’s the Eric number: EJ353889. The short version is that teaching grammar outside of the actual context of writing has no value. My statement is that since it has no value, it actually has a negative value - because the time is wasted and can’t be spent on anything else. Constance Weaver does a good job of talking about some of the research in her book _Teaching Grammar in Context_ (http://books.heinemann.com/products/0375.aspx).
Also of interest might be this research review by Krashen, Rolstad & McSwan, which is specifically about second language instruction - but focuses mostly on first language instruction research.
We know that teaching without doing is harmful. Leads to cheating, too. We know that we need to teach about what others have done, in the context of doing ourselves. What drive me absolutely nuts is just how much we actually DO know. And how little it seems to matter.
So many great comments. Seems like a follow-up to the discussion last night on Classroom 2.0. One has to wonder where the “core knowledge” and the higher order thinking skills intersect and how do we best help students achieve in schools.
An example that sticks in my mind is from Randy Pausch this summer at an Alice institute. He was talking about testing your programming. He made a comment about using a hamster (or some rodent) and if your program worked, the rodent lives, if not- it dies. His point was that he did not want to see a program to fly airplanes, for example, fail due to insufficient testing. He’d much rather sacrifice the rodent.
Are we sacrificing our “rodents” in school, simply because we are not testing them properly on the knowledge or skills that they will need to succeed in the real world? Education, teaching, is constantly evolving, or at least I hope it is. It’d be nice to finally get it right and stop the sacrifice of our students and their potential.
So Will, I don’t have an answer to your question, but simply more questions.
The sad truth is we never will. We will always have teachers that engage students and use every method necessary to teach their students. And sadly, we will always have teachers who show up to work, pull out their laminated lessons plans, turn on the overhead projector and have their students copy the scribbled handwriting in their loose-lead notebooks. Until there is a system that purges the under-performing teachers, we will always have students who come home from school and tell their parents they did not learn anything today.
We will stop giving kids tests they can cheat on when we find a way to assess what students have learned in a manner that does not frustrate them to the point that they are compelled to cheat in order to “prove” that they have learned.
Will,
I was very shocked to see such a small post with so many responses! With such an open ended question you have gotten 45 comments so far! I started reading through some people’s comments. Such as Angie who said “Who ever said that test grades had to come from tests? What about projects? (And not the poster project or anything of the same ilk.) What about test grades based on participation/discussion? Anything that is evaluative can be a test grade. We need to stop thinking that means a piece of paper.” I think this is a very valid point. No student learns the same or can be evaluated like the other, yet this is how education currently stands. I like Angie’s idea of having participation and outside and interesting class projects.
Another interesting comment was from Rob De Lorenzo, saying “In an age where information was difficult to attain, information memorization and regurgitation was important so tests were designed to meet that need. Now, with such easy access to information, tests that evaluate information attainment are both irrevelant and outdated. With any piece of information available on-demand, assessments and evaluations need to be skills-based, not information-based.” I am a college student and in one of my classes, we have recently learned how technology can be used in multiple kinds of evaluation. When I was in high school, and even now in college, I don’t retain anything from lectures. But anything hands on or a discussion of the subject really helps for me. Using technology can help students not memorize rote facts, but understand much more indept any topic. Memorizing is not helping to grasp concepts.
So, when are we going to spot giving kids tests that they can cheat on? It’s when we have the proper technology and staff to create great lesson plans and evaluation methods. In a computer lab, student can have options of what test they can take. I believe this is the begging of the best way to teach and evaluate.
First, I’m not biting on attempt to answer the question. I’m not sure cheating is the issue, as many have sort of hinted at in their comments.
Second, rational (and even some irrational) people respond to incentives.
Third, David’s post 4th from the top is where to start this conversation. Let’s define those things and then determine if - based on our definition - that “cheating” is something we want to discourage.
Finally, this
Robert Cringley article describes the world today. Different than our previous world in more ways than we know I think. We can not use definitions from the old world to describe the new. “Cheating” used to mean one thing. Now, I’m not sure what it means.
[…] a pretty comprehensive series on rethinking assessment written by Grace Rubenstein that picks up on my question here yesterday in some provocative ways. (Full disclosure: I sit on the national advisory board for […]
A good example for all… I am applying for a Doctoral program at the university where I got my Master’s Degree. I have to take the GRE exam to apply and be considered. Now why after successfully completing a Masters with all A’s and one B (drat on statistics) and a successful career in the field of over 20 years…why should I have to take a test???? Also a big push in education is using essential questions…I rarely see it done or done well. While a lot of teachers talk a good game about this, it is plainly easier to give tests & quizzes that can be graded by a Scantron
I think David did hit the nail on the head when “we” re-evaluate all of our status-quo educational definitions. But “we” are not just the educators in the classroom. “We” are the companies that market standardized tests whcih reduce students to a numerical success/failure statistic. “We” are the administrators who are creative enough to find other ways to justify their school’s successes other than standardized test scores. “We” are the school support staff (like myself) that find creative ways to introduce teachers to alternative assessments, because most often they don’t have the time to find them themselves. “We” are school district employees who look at policies across our district and make changes to support authentic student learning - and support teachers who make those changes. “We” are parents who acknowledge that maybe just because I learned it one way in school, that doesn’t mean that my child has to learn it the very same way.
That’s the tough thing about school reform: for it to work, you have to get everyone invested in it - but usually everyone has their own right answer.
“We might ask, as a criterion for any subject taught in primary school, whether, when fully developed, it is worth an adult’s knowing, and whether having known it as a child makes a person a better adult. If the answer to both questions is negative or ambiguous, then the material is cluttering the curriculum.” The Process of Education, p. 52
Given particular subject matter or a particular concept, it is easy to ask trivial questions or to lead the child to ask trivial questions. The trick is to find the medium questions that can be answered and that take you somewhere.” The Process of Education, p. 40
“The best way to create interest in a subject is to render it worth knowing, which means to make the knowledge gained usable in one’s thinking beyond the situation in which the learning has occurred.” The Process of Education, p. 31
It is surprising and somewhat discouraging how little attention has been paid to the intimate nature of teaching and school learning in the debates on education that have raged over the past decade. These debates have been so focused on performance and standards that they have mostly overlooked the means by which teachers and pupils alike go about their business in real-life classrooms – how teachers teach and how pupils learn” The Culture of Education, p. 86
“What we need is a school reform movement with a better sense of where we are going, with deeper convictions about what kind of people we want to be… All the standards in the world will not, like a helping hand, achieve the goal of making our multicultural, our threatened society come alive again, not alive just as a competitor in the world’s markets, but as a nation worth living in and for” The Culture of Education, p. 118
This post has been buzzing around my mind rather annoyingly, so I keep coming back to it.
Realize this: Students need to know hard facts. Hard facts are the basis for those embarrassing studies that show half of Americans as unable to place Iraq on a map, or the names of the president during the Great Depression.
Tests assess that, and the tests that best assess that are the tests that, very hypothetically, students could cheat on.
Rote memorization is a brain exercise, and, if we avoid overdosing, remains valuable in our pedagogy. Traditional educational methods alike are worthwhile as training our young minds to remember even the barest facts.
Refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy: Without the first level of Knowledge, we can’t move on to the higher levels of thinking. Simple as that.
I still haven’t quite placed my finger on why, but this questions irks if not insults me.
I don’t disagree that some content knowledge (hard facts) is necessary, but I think it isn’t sufficient. But my question is, those Americans you referred to (and is it just Americans and should we be limiting our discussion to Americans?) were mostly taught with those traditional methods and with those tests, so why don’t they know those “hard facts” you think they should? I think that’s part of the question we’re all trying to answer.
I say Americans because most Americans celebrate ignorance, whether it’s not reading anything worthwhile or simply joining the cult of hating math.
Soft assessment — called authentic — hasn’t appeared in a form that will teach lists or facts nearly as well as rote memorization. To be fair, the biggest fault with rote memorization is that without building on that scaffold, the information is forgotten.
Americans, taking pride in their ignorance, don’t build on their scaffold. Students don’t, either.
Another beef I have with authentic assessment is that students will take advantage of every subjective loophole and argue that their inferior work should receive an inferior grade. There are too many problems with authentic assessment as it stands.
I say Americans because most Americans celebrate ignorance, whether it’s not reading anything worthwhile or simply joining the cult of hating math.
Soft assessment — called authentic — hasn’t appeared in a form that will teach lists or facts nearly as well as rote memorization. To be fair, the biggest fault with rote memorization is that without building on that scaffold, the information is forgotten.
Americans, taking pride in their ignorance, don’t build on their scaffold. Students don’t, either.
Another beef I have with authentic assessment is that students will take advantage of every subjective loophole and argue that their inferior work should receive an inferior grade. There are too many problems with authentic assessment as it stands.
I agree with you Baxter. There are just things that you have to study and remember in order to learn them. Bloom’s is a good place to look. If kids can’t do the first stage by simply memorizing some basic concepts and “hard facts,” then how can they move up the chart? That basic knowledge and fulfillment is at the heart of many social science explanations for how we develop.
As for why it irks you…I think it has to do with the uncomfortable nature of the liberal slant of all of this discussion. I agree that not all students learn the same or at the same rate, but a vast majority of them learn in extremely similar ways and rates. Are we as teachers expected to create a different test for each student? Where is the standard, then? I know that most of you will say that having a rigid standard isn’t productive, but correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that how the world works. You can either do something, or you can’t. You don’t get to change the expectation just because you’re a visual learner not an auditory one.
Let them cheat. It’s the best form of civil protest possible in a system that promotes gaming the system over learning.
Denise Pope-Clark’s book, Doing School, has great case studies of how students do this.
Our society has changed. In an age where information was difficult to attain, information memorization and regurgitation was important so tests were designed to meet that need. Now, with such easy access to information, tests that evaluate information attainment are both irrevelant and outdated. With any piece of information available on-demand, assessments and evaluations need to be skills-based, not information-based.
I totally agree Rob.
The most authentic and rewarding assessments in courses I have either taken or taught - involved a chance to creatively and thoughtfully apply skills and knowledge to a meaningful and engaging issue.
I fear a number of educators are still too afraid to let get of the mantra from the Beatles song Across the Universe, “nothing’s gonna change my world”.
Is this a test Will?
Asking a question on your blog is one way to open an discussion, and though we’re posting the content of this blog entry, it’s still an important topic to consider. My personal preference is to consider the question:
What types of tests are relevant?
If a test is going to be similar to a real world experience, then the most relevant test should have the following characteristics:
1] The test should allow students access to any information system available (the Internet; Wikipedia; news sources; personal networks…).
2] The test should demand that students ‘apply information’ to a context or situation, rather than simply restate ‘learned’ facts.
3] The test should offer students a range of ways to respond (the written word; audio recording; product dev’t; physical demonstration…).
A ‘test’ of this type is more likely a ‘performance task’; and although this type of test wouldn’t be easy to administer, it would provide the truest test of one’s learning. Thank goodness we don’t provide driver’s licenses, pilot’s licenses, or dental licenses on the basis of the written test!
I would say, “When we’ve changed the definitions
Of
Teaching,
Learning,
Assessment, &
well, Cheating!
In response to David… I agree!!! Says it all!
And when is that going to be, exactly? ;0)
What “We” are we talking about here? We as society? We as educators? We as learners?
If only “We” as educators care then we are
misguidedmisguiding.If we make tests that you can’t cheat on, then there’s no right or wrong answer. The idea of grading only assignments that could be considered subjective are scary for several reasons.
1) Time it takes to grade.
2) Parents. A subjective assignment/grade is just asking for parents to criticize/call out a teacher for favoritism or dislike.
3) Consistency. Grading things anything subjective can vary greatly from one test/paper to another, depending on mood, surroundings, time of day, etc. Anyone who says it doesn’t is lying.
While I definitely agree and would hate to see any of these three be obstacles to true and authentic assessment, I think they are some of the reasons why teachers resist.
A good rubric helps with that.
I hope this doesn’t post twice.
A good rubric can help grade the important assessments that kids cannot cheat on. Sure, you’ll have basic assignments you’ll grade like always, but for important assessments, a rubric guided “test” can answer all those questions you have.
Get rid of grades and that takes care of #2 and #3 and rolls them into a changed #1: Time it takes to assess where a student is at and then figure out what they need to help them progress. And that would be a pretty good description of our jobs, wouldn’t it?
After working in alternative ed for a number of years I think the question is:
When are students going to stop caring about the results of assessments that are not authentic and meaningful?
As Rob De Lorenzo points out, today memorization of facts are not all that important when with a couple of key strokes all information of this type is at your fingertips. So, an even better question to ask is:
When will employers, college admissions, and other factors of the “real world” stop caring about the results of assessments that do not measure how a student is able to apply information?
I’m confused by the question - you mean kids actually cheat? With joking aside…my real answer is, when we as educators begin to THINK OUTSIDE THE TEST BOX, then and only then will cheating be obsolete.
Amen to that.
I second that amen. I also agree that educators must think outside the box. Give students projects that require them to use their technological skills to gather the answer. Gone should be the paper and pencil test. Students should be doing while learning. It is no fun have a teacher talking at for 90 minutes or even 45 minutes. There are so many tools available for free and pay that we as educators can reinvent the way assessment is done. At the end of the class what do we want the students to get out of the information presented to them?
What about the students being held accountable? All the responsibility should not fall on the teacher to create a “cheat-proof” test.
I have to disagree with Rob that tests that evaluate information attainment are irrelevant. Perhaps many of those tests are irrelevant but not all.
I think E.D. Hirsch is correct that all students need some core knowledge, even if the information is readily available. I feel like we’re instilling an attitude in our students that you don’t need to know anything because you can just look it up online.
Well, yeah, people need to know not to eat certain berries they find in the wild or that some snakes are poisonous. Basic laws of physics and understanding of algebra might also be necessary but can’t anything that is truly necessary knowledge be assessed in a context of application?
There definiately needs to be a core knowledge- It’ll act as a starting point of our search engine query or our blog post or a twitter query or whatever. We need to know something for us to build our knowledge upon.
I would agree wholeheartedly. If we follow this slippery slope to its end, we will have students who “know” nothing unless they have an internet connection. But, perhaps that core of knowledge is shifting somewhat?
I agree. I’m reminded of the National Lampoon’s European Vacation movie when Chevy Chase tries to order in French. He has all the words right on the little translator, but can’t put it together correctly.
Common knowledge is just that…common knowledge. Stuff that everyone should know without having to look it up. Stuff like the order of the Presidents of the US is important if you’re going on Jeopardy or if you want to impress people at a party, but is it necessary to memorize it?
I also agree that rubrics help out with subjective grading, but they never truly assess all the components of every child’s product. It still winds up being either too standardized or too vague to accomplish the objective.
Cheating or sharing and collaboration?
People will stop cheating when failure is allowed.
“You failed this assignment/test, let’s look at why, set reasonable and individual goals for you, and make a plan to achieve them.”
Perfect. A system where individual growth with respect to criteria or objectives, not a number grade whose only use is to compare to others.
True competency based evaluation is the key.
You could have stopped at “When are we going to stop giving kids tests…?”
I just read an article at Higher Learning about a prof that walked out if a student used text messaging during a lecture. This prof interpreted the activity as disrespectful , which is a bit of a stretch.
In the comments a number of people reported that they gave pop quizzes to the whole class a punishment for “disruptive” behavior. The message is “tests are not to enhance learning, they are social control, forced compliance punitive.” Effective for some purposes perhaps (police state) but hardly higher learning.
Oy. It’s all about control and owning the knowledge I guess.
He who owns the past, controls the future; he who owns the present, controls the past.
Tests also establish a rank and reduce our students to numbers. Do we really need this kind of competition in learning? They take what is often intrinsically motivating (learning new cool stuff) and reduce it to a chore done for extrinsic purposes (we have to learn this or we will get a bad grade).
Grades really are arbitrary anyway, and they aren’t exactly the best predictors for future achievement. So, not to answer your question with a question, but what exactly do they (students) get out of cheating?
They get a better grade, acceptance to a better school, out of having to memorize facts(which they find absolutely pointless most of the time), and the thrill of risk taking. Many of them also get to avoid having to come to uncomfortable conflict or self admission of learning differences or disabilities. Another product I believe of our extrinsic heavy status quo system of schooling that values individual achievement ahead of collaborative knowledge construction and punishes those not equally equipped to play the game of school where instead of fostering each child’s strengths.
Cheating actually sounds like a great idea. Sometimes I think we should reward those who are good at it.
I like your final thought. Perhaps effective cheating could be interpreted as “creative problem solving”. I would imagine that some pretty elaborate systems for cheating have been developed by some pretty bright individuals!!! Those students are the real innovators.
Who ever said that test grades had to come from tests? What about projects? (And not the poster project or anything of the same ilk.) What about test grades based on participation/discussion? Anything that is evaluative can be a test grade. We need to stop thinking that means a piece of paper.
So many good comments that make you go “hmmmm”! There are many valid points and I am trying to let them all sink in. I am not sure there is a good concrete answer to that question right now but there should be many trials (”tests”…hah!) that should be taking place to answer this question.
Too funny. Just got this link from Edutopia on re-inventing assessment.
I’m an orchestra director. When students come to play scales tests or tests on their concert repertoire, there’s no possible way to cheat. They either play the music correctly, or not (I do use a rubric to catch all the in-betweens).
It’s funny that you bring this up during our PSSA testing window (or coincidence?), and I’d be curious to see how many students cheat on those tests as opposed to the regularly given tests on class content.
I’m the wrong guy for an answer, but I’m definitely interested in the discussion.
I would agree that you can’t get more authentic than performance-based assessment. It is used in music, in art, in sports - and somehow in the core education content areas, “performance-based” has gotten translated into performance on tests rather than on real tasks. Tests are easer. Tests fit in to an assembly-line, automated teach-to-the-masses form of education.
On a free write:
Kids will stop cheating when assessment becomes a tool and a grade can’t be used as a weapon.
Kids will stop cheating when adults (like professional baseball players who resort to injection of substances to enhance performance!) model ethical behavior
Kids will stop cheating when adults model accepting of their fate and owning up to actions, like not using a PBA card or a lame excuse to get out of a ticket when they know they have been speeding.
Kids will stop cheating when a GPA and class rank are eliminated.
Kids will stop cheating when they are prepared well enough that everyone can be highly proficient because they were taught and learned at the highest levels.
or
Kids will stop cheating when the standards are lowered enough that everyone succeeds without having to do any effort.
Awesome response Barry. I need to do some freewriting again! That assessments really have become weapons or levers is a sad commentary on where we are at.
Barry…Right on!!!!!
I couldn’t agree more. If a student truly understands the information there should be no reason to cheat on an exam. However as long as we have students that are not learning at the pace and level that has been deemed appropriate in conjunction with the schools having to meet exam criteria there will be cheating.
Authentic assessment looks good on paper. In most forms, it doesn’t test thinking any better than any other types of assessment.
Benjamin,
I believe authentic assessment can help to “test” application of one’s knowledge/thinking better than other types of assessment (especially tests).
[…] Rethinking Testing I read a question that was subject a Weblogg-ed blog: When Are We Going to Stop Giving Kids Tests That They Can Cheat On? […]
I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that there needs to be a core knowledge - and will go one step further and say that different sorts of disciplines / career paths require different sorts of core knowledge.
To say that, “well, you can always look it up online,” won’t make me feel very confident when I’m in the operating room and I see the surgeon go to google and look up the operation as I slip into unconsciousness. I would really prefer that they KNOW how to perform the operation and have demonstrated that proficiency to someone who is qualified to evaluate it. Hmmm. For that matter, I’d also like them to be able to identify the parts of the body that they are operating - while rote knowledge, I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
I’d like the person who flies my plane to know how to operate the controls without a manual. I’d like the engineer that designs the bridge I drive across to have a good understanding of civil engineering so that I can be assured the design is reasonably sound.
This requires a core knowledge and a set of basic facts and skills. Even for us to be able to write these comments, someone had to drill us on spelling and grammar so that we learned how to write well.
Isn’t the real problem how we convince students to learn these skill sets well without testing them? The test, paper, or project (all of which can be cheated on) provides the “deadline” to learn. How many of us submit that paper to a journal, write that memo for the meeting, or turn in that assessment report without a deadline?
I fervently hope that the onset of some of this great new technology will allow us to be more flexible in our approach to education (less of a one-test-fits-all-students model) and more of a learn-it-until-you-understand-it-and-can-demonstrate-it model.
Personally, I can’t wait until the day when I can stop grading math tests. Speaking of which …
Well, I imagine that most of us here do all of those things without a deadline, since I’m pretty sure reading and commenting here wasn’t an assignment and didn’t have a due date. So perhaps part of the question is what’s different about this for us, and how do we transfer that to our students?
What is different is that we are adults and are motivated by concepts such as self-enhancement, comraderie, and a need to feel like we are making a difference. Students, while they may want to enhance their situation in the social make-up of their groups through comraderie, haven’t acquired the maturity and discipline to seek this type of dialogue. At least, most of the students I have met have not reached this point.
I’m sure the argument will be that the school system forced them to seek instant gratification instead of deliberation and self-discipline through its use of the “pass or fail” mentality.
Face it, education today struggles to compete against celebrity status and pubescent debauchery. It has always been that way…Elvis, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Bon Jovi, N’Sync, Britney Spears, and Hannah Montana.
I know this doesn’t answer the question, but students are going to cheat because they don’t care about the knowledge. They don’t see it as important. They can’t see the long-term view. And with our media saturated, attention deficit disordered world, who can blame them?
@Chris Edge - I think students are capable of more than we think. Certainly many students at my high school show glimpes of this when given the opportunity. And, yes, I do think we’ve somewhat trained them to be the way they are. Does that mean they will approach situations the same way adults do? No, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strive for that and restructure our approaches to encourage that.
I think the fundamental difference is that we are commenting here because it is a topic of interest to us. I suspect our students are willingly commenting on their friends’ myspace and facebook pages in a similar fashion because it’s of interest to them.
We need students to learn a little bit of everything. Given their individual interests, they are not going to LIKE everything we need to teach them, regardless of how good the instruction is.
Now, if the response is that we don’t need to teach them a core set of skills, then we don’t need an educational system. We could just hook students into the Internet and hope that they find something productive to do with their time.
I’m sure there are activites that we (as adults) have to do that we would not do without a deadline. The looming date of April 15th comes to mind … and is it kind of a form of cheating to have an accountant do your taxes for you?
I think we can do a much better job of engaging students, of investigating topics of both importance and interest. Yes, we won’t ever get to 100% engagement and interest, but we can do better at showing them the relevance and meaning in what we’re asking them to do, and allowing them as much as possible to relate it to their interests and “likes.”
As far as taxes go, it is amazing how many folks in the U.S. “outsource” that to someone else. So is preparing your taxes a “core skill?”
I agree that there’s a certain level of knowledge that you need to know. But I bet we’d draw the “essential” line in different places. I just wanted to chime in on the “drill us on spelling and grammar” point. Totally off topic - but we don’t learn how to write by taking spelling tests and punctuating random sentences. We learn to write by practicing how to write. Turns out that drilling, be it in spelling or in grammar, actually has zero impact on future performance. George Hillocks did a great study on grammar instruction a while back - I’m projecting those results for spelling.
Oh - and the same is true for surgeons - they didn’t learn to do surgery well by reading about it. They practiced. Same with engineers - they built little bridges first.
I’m thinking more and more, or maybe I’ve always felt this way, and couldn’t articulate it, that school should be about habit formation - but good, critical learning habits, not the habits that most institutions are actually teaching. Habits like crap detection. Asking questions. Writing for understanding. Reading. Thinking. Experimenting. Good teachers promote these things - in spite of their schools.
Karl - maybe that gets to your question, too.
I agree on the grammar and spelling, although I don’t have the research to back it up. Note that I’m not saying grammar and spelling aren’t important (I feel like I’ve had this discussion about 5 times in my school), but that they are important in the context of communicating. And therefore I agree with Bud that they get better at writing/communicating by doing more writing/communicating and then receiving timely, relevant and meaningful feedback (which might include some grammar and spelling instruction). And that feedback - that assessment - doesn’t need a grade attached and rarely would be something they could “cheat” at.
Bud, I think you are getting at my question. We talk a lot in my school about having students “do” math and “do” science and “do” language arts, as opposed to simply learning about science or math or language arts that others have done. Again, I’m not saying they don’t need to learn about what others have done, but that shouldn’t be all they’re learning, and too often in our current school climate that is the case.
Karl,
The research is out there. Of course, many of authors that I’d like to link you to here are stuck in journal silos that require subscriptions or a trip to the library. I’d encourage you to seek out George Hillocks, Jr., and look at his 1986/1987 meta-analysis of writing instruction. It was published in the May 1987 issue of _Educational Leadership._ Here’s the Eric number: EJ353889. The short version is that teaching grammar outside of the actual context of writing has no value. My statement is that since it has no value, it actually has a negative value - because the time is wasted and can’t be spent on anything else. Constance Weaver does a good job of talking about some of the research in her book _Teaching Grammar in Context_ (http://books.heinemann.com/products/0375.aspx).
Also of interest might be this research review by Krashen, Rolstad & McSwan, which is specifically about second language instruction - but focuses mostly on first language instruction research.
We know that teaching without doing is harmful. Leads to cheating, too. We know that we need to teach about what others have done, in the context of doing ourselves. What drive me absolutely nuts is just how much we actually DO know. And how little it seems to matter.
Oops - didn[t incllude the link to the review (PDF)
http://www.elladvocates.org/documents/AZ/Krashen_Rolstad_MacSwan_review.pdf
Lots of good data there.
So many great comments. Seems like a follow-up to the discussion last night on Classroom 2.0. One has to wonder where the “core knowledge” and the higher order thinking skills intersect and how do we best help students achieve in schools.
An example that sticks in my mind is from Randy Pausch this summer at an Alice institute. He was talking about testing your programming. He made a comment about using a hamster (or some rodent) and if your program worked, the rodent lives, if not- it dies. His point was that he did not want to see a program to fly airplanes, for example, fail due to insufficient testing. He’d much rather sacrifice the rodent.
Are we sacrificing our “rodents” in school, simply because we are not testing them properly on the knowledge or skills that they will need to succeed in the real world? Education, teaching, is constantly evolving, or at least I hope it is. It’d be nice to finally get it right and stop the sacrifice of our students and their potential.
So Will, I don’t have an answer to your question, but simply more questions.
I give a good presentation called How to cheat Online that address a lot of htese issues. You can check it out at http://www.uvsc.edu/disted/cheat
Great resource, John, thanks!
[…] When Are We Going to Stop Giving Kids Tests That They Can Cheat On? […]
The sad truth is we never will. We will always have teachers that engage students and use every method necessary to teach their students. And sadly, we will always have teachers who show up to work, pull out their laminated lessons plans, turn on the overhead projector and have their students copy the scribbled handwriting in their loose-lead notebooks. Until there is a system that purges the under-performing teachers, we will always have students who come home from school and tell their parents they did not learn anything today.
Why give any tests?
Just wonderin’
We will stop giving kids tests they can cheat on when we find a way to assess what students have learned in a manner that does not frustrate them to the point that they are compelled to cheat in order to “prove” that they have learned.
Will,
I was very shocked to see such a small post with so many responses! With such an open ended question you have gotten 45 comments so far! I started reading through some people’s comments. Such as Angie who said “Who ever said that test grades had to come from tests? What about projects? (And not the poster project or anything of the same ilk.) What about test grades based on participation/discussion? Anything that is evaluative can be a test grade. We need to stop thinking that means a piece of paper.” I think this is a very valid point. No student learns the same or can be evaluated like the other, yet this is how education currently stands. I like Angie’s idea of having participation and outside and interesting class projects.
Another interesting comment was from Rob De Lorenzo, saying “In an age where information was difficult to attain, information memorization and regurgitation was important so tests were designed to meet that need. Now, with such easy access to information, tests that evaluate information attainment are both irrevelant and outdated. With any piece of information available on-demand, assessments and evaluations need to be skills-based, not information-based.” I am a college student and in one of my classes, we have recently learned how technology can be used in multiple kinds of evaluation. When I was in high school, and even now in college, I don’t retain anything from lectures. But anything hands on or a discussion of the subject really helps for me. Using technology can help students not memorize rote facts, but understand much more indept any topic. Memorizing is not helping to grasp concepts.
So, when are we going to spot giving kids tests that they can cheat on? It’s when we have the proper technology and staff to create great lesson plans and evaluation methods. In a computer lab, student can have options of what test they can take. I believe this is the begging of the best way to teach and evaluate.
-Heather
First, I’m not biting on attempt to answer the question. I’m not sure cheating is the issue, as many have sort of hinted at in their comments.
Second, rational (and even some irrational) people respond to incentives.
Third, David’s post 4th from the top is where to start this conversation. Let’s define those things and then determine if - based on our definition - that “cheating” is something we want to discourage.
Finally, this
Robert Cringley article describes the world today. Different than our previous world in more ways than we know I think. We can not use definitions from the old world to describe the new. “Cheating” used to mean one thing. Now, I’m not sure what it means.
[…] When Are We Going to Stop Giving Kids Tests That They Can Cheat On? […]
[…] a pretty comprehensive series on rethinking assessment written by Grace Rubenstein that picks up on my question here yesterday in some provocative ways. (Full disclosure: I sit on the national advisory board for […]
A good example for all… I am applying for a Doctoral program at the university where I got my Master’s Degree. I have to take the GRE exam to apply and be considered. Now why after successfully completing a Masters with all A’s and one B (drat on statistics) and a successful career in the field of over 20 years…why should I have to take a test???? Also a big push in education is using essential questions…I rarely see it done or done well. While a lot of teachers talk a good game about this, it is plainly easier to give tests & quizzes that can be graded by a Scantron
It is a shame that convenience trumps the craft of teaching.
I think David did hit the nail on the head when “we” re-evaluate all of our status-quo educational definitions. But “we” are not just the educators in the classroom. “We” are the companies that market standardized tests whcih reduce students to a numerical success/failure statistic. “We” are the administrators who are creative enough to find other ways to justify their school’s successes other than standardized test scores. “We” are the school support staff (like myself) that find creative ways to introduce teachers to alternative assessments, because most often they don’t have the time to find them themselves. “We” are school district employees who look at policies across our district and make changes to support authentic student learning - and support teachers who make those changes. “We” are parents who acknowledge that maybe just because I learned it one way in school, that doesn’t mean that my child has to learn it the very same way.
That’s the tough thing about school reform: for it to work, you have to get everyone invested in it - but usually everyone has their own right answer.
Keep up the conversation!
Some great thoughts by Jerome Bruner:
“We might ask, as a criterion for any subject taught in primary school, whether, when fully developed, it is worth an adult’s knowing, and whether having known it as a child makes a person a better adult. If the answer to both questions is negative or ambiguous, then the material is cluttering the curriculum.” The Process of Education, p. 52
Given particular subject matter or a particular concept, it is easy to ask trivial questions or to lead the child to ask trivial questions. The trick is to find the medium questions that can be answered and that take you somewhere.” The Process of Education, p. 40
“The best way to create interest in a subject is to render it worth knowing, which means to make the knowledge gained usable in one’s thinking beyond the situation in which the learning has occurred.” The Process of Education, p. 31
It is surprising and somewhat discouraging how little attention has been paid to the intimate nature of teaching and school learning in the debates on education that have raged over the past decade. These debates have been so focused on performance and standards that they have mostly overlooked the means by which teachers and pupils alike go about their business in real-life classrooms – how teachers teach and how pupils learn” The Culture of Education, p. 86
“What we need is a school reform movement with a better sense of where we are going, with deeper convictions about what kind of people we want to be… All the standards in the world will not, like a helping hand, achieve the goal of making our multicultural, our threatened society come alive again, not alive just as a competitor in the world’s markets, but as a nation worth living in and for” The Culture of Education, p. 118
Whew…. that’s more than enough to chew on
This post has been buzzing around my mind rather annoyingly, so I keep coming back to it.
Realize this: Students need to know hard facts. Hard facts are the basis for those embarrassing studies that show half of Americans as unable to place Iraq on a map, or the names of the president during the Great Depression.
Tests assess that, and the tests that best assess that are the tests that, very hypothetically, students could cheat on.
Rote memorization is a brain exercise, and, if we avoid overdosing, remains valuable in our pedagogy. Traditional educational methods alike are worthwhile as training our young minds to remember even the barest facts.
Refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy: Without the first level of Knowledge, we can’t move on to the higher levels of thinking. Simple as that.
I still haven’t quite placed my finger on why, but this questions irks if not insults me.
I don’t disagree that some content knowledge (hard facts) is necessary, but I think it isn’t sufficient. But my question is, those Americans you referred to (and is it just Americans and should we be limiting our discussion to Americans?) were mostly taught with those traditional methods and with those tests, so why don’t they know those “hard facts” you think they should? I think that’s part of the question we’re all trying to answer.
I say Americans because most Americans celebrate ignorance, whether it’s not reading anything worthwhile or simply joining the cult of hating math.
Soft assessment — called authentic — hasn’t appeared in a form that will teach lists or facts nearly as well as rote memorization. To be fair, the biggest fault with rote memorization is that without building on that scaffold, the information is forgotten.
Americans, taking pride in their ignorance, don’t build on their scaffold. Students don’t, either.
Another beef I have with authentic assessment is that students will take advantage of every subjective loophole and argue that their inferior work should receive an inferior grade. There are too many problems with authentic assessment as it stands.
Call me inflammatory, but in some senses, boredom can serve a purpose.
I say Americans because most Americans celebrate ignorance, whether it’s not reading anything worthwhile or simply joining the cult of hating math.
Soft assessment — called authentic — hasn’t appeared in a form that will teach lists or facts nearly as well as rote memorization. To be fair, the biggest fault with rote memorization is that without building on that scaffold, the information is forgotten.
Americans, taking pride in their ignorance, don’t build on their scaffold. Students don’t, either.
Another beef I have with authentic assessment is that students will take advantage of every subjective loophole and argue that their inferior work should receive an inferior grade. There are too many problems with authentic assessment as it stands.
Call me inflammatory, but in some senses, boredom is underrated.
Here’s hoping you don’t decide to run for office someday . . . at least not in this country
I agree with you Baxter. There are just things that you have to study and remember in order to learn them. Bloom’s is a good place to look. If kids can’t do the first stage by simply memorizing some basic concepts and “hard facts,” then how can they move up the chart? That basic knowledge and fulfillment is at the heart of many social science explanations for how we develop.
As for why it irks you…I think it has to do with the uncomfortable nature of the liberal slant of all of this discussion. I agree that not all students learn the same or at the same rate, but a vast majority of them learn in extremely similar ways and rates. Are we as teachers expected to create a different test for each student? Where is the standard, then? I know that most of you will say that having a rigid standard isn’t productive, but correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that how the world works. You can either do something, or you can’t. You don’t get to change the expectation just because you’re a visual learner not an auditory one.