Education, Cheating | featured news

Imagine taking a university exam in your own home, under the watchful eye of a webcam or with software profiling your keystrokes or your syntax to see whether it really is you answering the questions.

Teachers helped students correct mistakes on standardized tests, prepared them with actual test questions or left instructional posters displayed in the classroom during testing, according to school district reports.

Educators say John Allen asked Crescendo principals to show teachers the state standardized test. L.A. Unified was going to suspend him, but the board voted to fire him and close the campuses. The meeting at Crescendo Preparatory South was progressing as usual when the acting principal dropped a bombshell: She had been given copies of the upcoming standardized tests.

An investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows that hundreds of school systems nationwide exhibit suspicious test scores pointing to the possibility of cheating.

Students paid test-takers up to $3,600 to boost scores and their chances of getting into a top college, New York prosecutors said.

A college student from New York was paid between $1,500 and $2,500 to stand in for at least a half dozen students attending a prestigious Long Island high school and take the SAT exam for them, a prosecutor said Tuesday in announcing criminal charges in the case.

The schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, said he did not believe the increase meant that more misconduct was taking place.

Teachers spent nights huddled in a back room, erasing wrong answers on students' test sheets and filling in the correct bubbles. At another school, struggling students were seated next to higher-performing classmates so they could copy answers....

Atlanta's schools will flag suspicious test scores and achieve a culture of integrity in the wake of a cheating scandal that could lead to criminal charges, officials said Thursday.