Mercedes Schneider discovered that there are websites where cheaters share their secrets and boast about the ploys they have used to get grades for themselves or others that were undeserved.
Her post quotes many examples of cheater boasting.
If nothing else, the professionalization of cheating should warn us never to trust standardized tests, nor to assign high-stakes consequences to standardized tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Whether most people realize it or nott standardized tests by which teachers are graded by how well students assimilate the contents of them is a foot in the door, if not the beginning of propagandizing our children, just like Hitler’s youth were indoctrinated, not educated and other times in human history.
Charter schools are a part of that for sure but public schools too are in great danger under such a system.
“Truth” becomes what government wishes “truth” to be, as in Trump’s “truth”. I can think offhand of little if anything more injurious to human society than post’truth.
Advertisers do this all the time, telling us that portion of “truth” which will sell their products but do not except when the laws make them as in drugs what the consequences of purchasing their product may entail.
Such as the oil companies.
Ergo as educators we MUST stand for truth as independent, scholarship with integrity enlightens us.
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For sixteen years I have watched my large city’s educational test-score “fixer” crew manipulate truth to their own purposes; their game of “juking the stats” for the purpose of manipulating public opinion and/or garnering government funding has been exposed, documented and lamented…but never stopped. So, how to feel about Trump and HIS willingness to make ‘Truth’ become…what government wishes ‘truth’ to be”?
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I did not look.
Did she include Trump?
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So the Deutsche woman went undercover again. 🙂
Actually, the stories there are very creative, I “almost” want to say, the kids deserve the good grade.
This one is scary—I don’t trust pilots, anyways.
Taking the FAA ground school exam, I programmed all the answers to the questions in my calculator (think 1988). I also wrote a small program that said, “Reset memory? (Y/N)” Which did nothing but display that.
They asked that I clear the memory, so I called up that program, and they were happy. “Memory cleared.”
So when I took the test, I had all the answers and the testers were sure my calculator memory was cleared. Gotta laugh. I still have the certificate from that, and no, I’m not a pilot.
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“Here is one of the more creative schemes, useful only if one has an identical twin– and a restroom. . . ”
Nah, one doesn’t need a restroom. When I lived in Peru, I substitute taught two classes of English 4 (56 or so girls in each class) at an all girls Catholic school in Trujillo in Northern Peru. I was 18. Some of the girls were older than me. Needless to say I learned a lot more from that experience than all 110 of them combined learned more English. Anyway I was at a fiesta after my term of teaching and the girls informed me that the smarter of the two twins (one was in each class) took all the tests. Now, I had an aide that took attendance everyday so I didn’t feel too bad about not catching the ruse.
They also realized that indeed I knew Spanish (I pretended to not know that much to get them to talk in English) and that I understood all that they had said in class, which at times was not too “nice”. You should have seen them blush, because they knew they weren’t supposed to talk like that to a teacher and now they were caught. Quite a difference in “respect” for teachers, eh!
I ended up having to appear before a magistrate for not having the correct work permits (of which I knew nothing about) to work. I told him that I took the job to get money to travel to Macchu Picchu and throughout Southern Peru with a school group. I also told him that since I broke the law, even though I didn’t mean to, that I would forego being paid. It shocked him when I said that and he said that wasn’t right as I had worked and did the job and I should be paid. He let me go with no consequences. Somehow I felt quite lucky. And the trip was great!
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