by John Jensen, PhD

The debate over high-stakes testing pits the need for assessing student progress  against the negative effects of doing so. Three recent articles offer a glance into it.

In a guest post for Education Week (“Monty Neill: Building a Successful Test Reform Movement”, May 14, 2013), Monty Neill proposes halting or reducing state-level testing, citing as reasons teaching to the test, cost, school climate, time from teaching, narrowing the curriculum, and increased juvenile incarceration.

In the same issue, Michael Petrilli (“Am I Part of the Cure … or the Disease?”, May 14, 2013)  maintains that not testing but student achievement is the point, but that even small gains in test-verified reading and math enhance life trajectories, and teaching quality is what limits better instruction.  Acknowledging that testing can generate temptations of cheating, a culture of fear, and narrowing of the curriculum, he would retain it nonetheless but suggests a goal of improving mediocre schools even a little, and teaching systematically the skills making the most difference.

Deborah Meier (“Problem vs. Solution: A Response”, Education Week, May 16, 2013) regards the testing issue as a distraction from more fundamental problems such as a public polarized by a growing gap between rich and poor, and that the wealthy steer resources to the schools their own children attend.  She holds that a competitive education marketplace produces outcomes woefully wrong for children, that public education should address problems one at a time in light of the entire spectrum of needs.

So apart from altering the nation’s political makeup, we face two immediate problems–one improving education and the other finding out how well we do it. Both matter. Though a school’s quality may be low, how we test may depress even that.

There are many dogs in the fight about testing.  Picture a  round table discussion of stakeholders. At the table are a parent, teacher, district administrator, state legislator, and federal official. Each asserts, “I need to know X, and here’s why.”  They are arguing over competing priorities when one of them points her thumb over her shoulder.

Seated against a wall is a student.  Everyone falls silent as they realize he heard everything they said.  Someone addresses him.

“So what do you want?”

“I just want to learn something,” he answers quietly.

The stakeholders try to resume their discussion but find no traction. Their urgency evaporates as they realize how superficial are their demands compared to the substance of the student’s need. The student is the elephant in the room. They look at each other and wonder, “How can we even begin to find a way to resolve this?”

By way of answer, consider a different analogy.  Imagine you are on a research team investigating gases rising from the earth in a remote location.  Your helicopter malfunctions and sets you down unexpectedly close to the emissions, and disembarking, your team realizes that it is in danger.  Everyone must rapidly grab something and move away quickly.  Before you are three canisters, one labeled AIR, another WATER, and a third  FOOD.

Which do you seize? Your life may depend on your choice, and you recall the rule of three, that in general humans can live 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food.  Knowing that in the toxic air of your  surroundings you could be dead in three minutes, you grab the AIR canister first.  Only after you have air under control do you pick up anything else.  You secure your prime value before even considering a secondary one.

Back in the classroom, we search among the canisters concerned with testing to find the one labeled AIR.  What is the most essential factor, the one we wish to establish with certainty, the one we refuse to sell off for the sake of a lesser value, the one to which we add others only if they do not detract from the first?

Finding an answer everyone can accept is, I believe, a direction that eventually resolves the dispute over testing. We first agree on our criterion value.  I would like to nominate one on the basis of two axioms:

Axiom 1.  Students progress through their own effort.  Instruction works as it enables students to focus attention and apply effort on tasks that generate learning.  The essence of instruction is directing students’ attention and effort.

Axiom 2.  Effort is propelled by motivation.  Aside from the sheer time available for their effort (jeopardized by countless intrusions including test-associated tasks), how students apply themselves arises directly from their interest, enthusiasm, ownership, sense of progress, and so on–signals of their motivational state directly preceding effort. If kids are bored and distracted and you want to teach them something, you either alter their motivation or forget about accomplishing anything.         If in a psychological sense all behavior originates from a state that makes the behavior possible, we settle on students’ inner motivation as the key condition we must enhance.

A common complaint about testing, however, is exactly its effect on motivation.  For teachers to appreciate this better, I would like them to experience an activity I often presented in training workshops in the 1970s.  It goes like this.  I’ll trust your imagination to figure out the lesson involved:

‘“We’re going to start off by giving you a spelling test for college freshmen,” the consultant announces to start off a morning. ”We’ll assign you to activities later based on the scores you get. Please take out a blank sheet of paper.”

People groan but cooperate.  In a serious tone the consultant then reads the words while people write them:

asinine, braggadocio, accommodate, diarrhea, chauffeur, desiccate, impostor, inoculate, hors d’oeuvres, liquefy, mayonnaise, moccasin, obbligato, narcissistically, rococo, benefited, rarefy, resuscitate, sacrilegious, supersede, titillate, and paraphernalia.

“Please exchange papers,”  the consultant says crisply, and then spells each word on the board.  Checkers mark off wrong answers on the paper they have, and hand it back to its owner.

“How many got none wrong?” the consultant asks, writing a zero on the board.  I’ve never seen zero wrong, but if people miss none, their number is jotted beside the zero.  Under it the consultant lists numbers 1-20.

“How many got  (number) wrong?” he or she says, going down the column. Everyone raises their hand at some point to acknowledge their number of mistakes.  Most scores tend to fall around half wrong with some missing as many as 17 of 20.

People laugh, moan, and remember emotionally how it felt to be measured by their mistakes. The exercise concludes with a discussion of its implication for instruction–how discouraged they remembered feeling when they were in school, how they may have refused to try, how they preferred to be graded down than be humiliated by trying and failing, how disheartened they were at being labeled poor at anything, and so on.

If we wish both to teach and assess in a way that enhances motivation, how can we?

Competency-based  instruction offers a clue. You declare it acceptable for students to have different competencies to practice even if they do much work together. You identify a discrete skill or chunk of knowledge you want them to know, tell them exactly the work needed and the signal marking its completion, and check it off when it’s done.  Developed this way, their record shows unbroken success.  Wherever they are on the continuum, they just work steadily at the next step.

This approach frees students from a peculiar psychic burden. If I have five units of knowledge to acquire and accomplish that, my working memory tells me “I got five.” My score matches my effort.  I own the five and take pride in it.

This changes if  I am told, “We expected you to get ten but you only got five.”

Only? My success becomes failure for a reason beyond my control, and my effort is devalued. I feel like a failure solely because someone measures me against a standard that does not serve me personally.

Think about yourself.  Intuitively, do you mark your knowledge by  knowing something or by not-knowing something else?  Surely the former.  Not-knowing measures are inherently antithetical to students’ natural motivation.  While they spontaneously compare themselves to peers, they regard this measure of their not-knowing as fair. They are constituted to emulate standards demonstrated by peers,  but for this they only need objective information.

For schoolwork, a wall chart serves adequately by counting up cumulatively the contents of each one’s growing bank of knowledge. They can use the differences between them if they wish, but no one drives them to feel bad. (And check me if I’m wrong about this, but do not some teachers still believe that imposing bad feelings on students is their bottom-line motivator?  I infer this from observing students who actively fear their teacher.)

Once acknowledging positive motivation as our preferred long-term resource,  we don’t even hint to a student that his effort is of secondary importance. We are clear that if we organize his effort so it’s effective, recognize the effort, and count up its outcome objectively, he is more likely to repeat it. The objective count of  his progress on the specified tasks reveal exactly what he has learned. If his motivation and effort-driven success remain our primary values, we have no need to confine him under someone else’s web of meaning.

In my next article, I will show how to arrange effort for optimal motivation while accounting for its results in a way that fulfills stakeholders’ needs for information.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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Former head of the Atlanta Public Schools system Beverly Hall hasn’t been very public about accusations against her since she was charged three weeks ago with racketeering for alleged involvement with a massive cheating scandal. However, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that changed after her lawyer announced last week that Hall was “absolutely innocent” of the charges.

Richard Deane, a former US attorney and federal judge who is representing Hall, said that the there was no evidence against Hall to support the charges that she was instrumental in a conspiracy to force her staff to cheat on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.

According to Deane, Hall is also innocent of any attempts to cover up the cheating from the investigators and wasn’t aware that cheating on such a massive scale was going on in the district.

Fulton Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter has scheduled arraignments for May 3, when the defendants are expected to enter pleas of not guilty. Atlanta defense attorney Buddy Parker, who is not involved in the APS case, said Deane is doing what he can to overcome the substantial publicity that came after the indictment was returned, and during the scene of Hall and other educators surrendering at the jail. Parker, who once worked with Deane in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said he believes Deane would not be going public “if he didn’t have a belief the evidence is wanting and lacking.”

In an interview, Deane said that Hall set targets for her subordinates like any other supervisor because she believed those targets were genuinely achievable. He added that Hall believes that if the cheating did occur, it wasn’t a system-wide conspiracy, but rather was done by a few misguided individuals independently.

Deane stressed that Hall had no knowledge that anything regarding the CRCT was going amiss. He refused to speculate about reasons for the cheating, saying that this is an issue that his team plans to address in court.

Deane expressed frustration that the public appears to have accepted as fact that his client is guilty as charged.
“She is presumed to be innocent … and in fact she is innocent, ” he said. “That fact seems to be lost in the public dialogue.”
Hall was among 35 APS administrators and educators named in a 65-count indictment accusing them of conspiring to cheat on the  CRCT.

This year has marked a turnaround for Hall, who was previously cited as an outstanding example of the changes that the education reform movement can make in an urban school district – thanks to a dramatic hike in standardized test scores achieved under her tenure.

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Although Los Angeles Times readers don’t appear to be willing to give Michelle Rhee a second chance based on the poll result on the front page, education experts around the country appear to be much more measured in their responses to the allegations that she covered up a cheating scandal during her tenure as Chancellor of Washington D.C. public schools.

This has been a difficult week for Rhee, who has has to fend off accusations that she knew about the widespread cheating outlined in a  memo she commissioned that was made public late last week by PBS journalist John Merrow.

In an interview with The Times editorial board, Rhee said that although she “didn’t see the memo” at the time, consultant Sandy Sanford “was just writing a memo based on something that we already broadly knew.” She noted that the testing company had expressed reservations about the erasure analysis the memo relied on, and she added that later investigations found no widespread wrongdoing.

After leaving her position as Chancellor in 2010, Rhee became head of the education advocacy group StudentsFirst. The group has played a substantial role in the recent political season, throwing its support behind candidates who share their education reform ideas, including donating $250,000 to Los Angeles School Board candidates who had the support of the Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa this March.

The second look into Rhee’s tenure as Chancellor was kicked off by the conclusion of the investigation into the Atlanta cheating scandal, where a number of top district officials were charged with wrongdoing. The investigation showed that teachers and administrators — including Superintendent Beverly Hall — engaged in a systematic effort to alter student test results.

Howard Blume, writing for the LA Times, points out that the Atlanta scandal began quite similarly to the original D.C. story – with a limited number of schools initially involved.

Similar allegations about erasures that surfaced in Atlanta recently resulted in a grand jury indictment against former schools Supt. Beverly Hall and others. Authorities have alleged that Hall conspired to cheat or conceal cheating. The result was fraudulent bonuses for employees and a false read on student achievement, prosecutors said.

Some education activists and journalists have alleged serious flaws in the investigations cited by Rhee. They noted that early probes in Atlanta also turned up limited wrongdoing. At one point, Rhee hired a firm to conduct a narrow review in D.C. — the same company whose findings Atlanta officials cited in their defense.

There have been sharp drops in test scores at some D.C. schools that were flagged in the past for high erasure rates, according to the Washington Post. Such declines could indicate cheating, but are not proof of it. To date, no in-depth erasure analysis of the 2008 answer sheets has been conducted.

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New York State Education Commissioner John King continues to repeat his message that new standardized tests now being given in New York will prove to be a blessing for the state’s kids. In a press briefing with reporters, King stressed that the tests are a crucial link in a plan to make sure that New York students are graduating from high school ready for both career and college — and won’t require expensive remediation before being prepared to enter higher education.

Not all parents, however, are convinced.

The exams in questions are to be administered every year between the grades 3 and 8 and are based on the Common Core Standards that are being adopted by most of the states in the country. Advocates for the new tests say that they’re needed to check how well students are doing with what is considered a more complex and challenging curriculum. As standards rise, King predicts that scores will drop in the short term.

King has said – and repeated today – that the new tests will be more difficult and that scores are likely to drop.

Officials at New York State United Teachers have said they are not opposed to the new standards, but that it is too early to give tests that are aligned with them because they are so new.

King said schools have had since 2010 to prepare for the new standards. He said the state cannot afford to wait another year to hold schools accountable for them.

The standards are so low now, he said, that 65 percent of students leave school without having the skills necessary to succeed, whether they graduate or not.

Meanwhile, at least some of the parents in Syracuse are unconvinced by King’s arguments and plan to have their kids boycott the upcoming exams. Susan Grobsmith has instructed all three of her kids to push the test away when it is placed in front of them and plans to pick them up for school rather than have them sit in the classroom while their peers take the test.

Grobsmith is far from the only one who feels this way. Her family is part of a national movement that seeks to encourage parents to opt-out of standardized exams and at the same time lobby lawmakers and education experts to stop focusing on testing at the expense of everything else.

A Rochester school board member recently announced that she is refusing to have her child take the exams. The Saratoga Springs school board voted unanimously to call on the state to place less emphasis on the tests. A two-day protest was staged earlier this month at the U.S. Department of Education.

Opponents of the testing say it stresses students, provides limited measurement of a child’s capabilities, takes away valuable teaching time that inspires creativity and shares personal information with private companies that provide the tests.

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The promise of technology in education has not been fulfilled — at least not in schools like Seminole Ridge High School, according to The Palm Beach Post. When the district spent millions to equip its schools’ labs with 25,000 new computers, little did the administrators or students expect that most of that machine time was going to be taken up by nothing else but testing.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that their current technology stock might not even be enough. A recent delivery of 400 new laptops eased the crunch slightly, but students and teachers who were hoping to put these digital tools to work in innovative ways to improve the educational experienceare left disappointed as all the resources go towards one goal only: computerized standardized testing.

School districts across Florida are scrambling to upgrade and add technology ahead of a big shift in state-required testing in the 2014-2015 school year that will move even more exams online.

In Palm Beach County, that means adding 25,000 computers — a jump of more than 30 percent — and bandwidth and wireless upgrades at its schools to prepare.

Still, “in the schools, instruction is suffering because computers are so tied up with assessments, and we have so many assessments that classroom teachers can’t get their kids on the computers for instruction,” said Gary Weidenhamer, the district’s director of educational technology.

The computer shortage comes from a number of new initiatives introduced by Weidenhamer, among them a complete transition to computerized testing for the new standardized test set to take over as a replacement for the FCAT.

Florida isn’t the only state that’s having difficulties coping with the new computerized testing requirement without substantial additional investment in computer hardware and software.

A number of states have announced that they will be looking for an alternative to the venerable General Education Diploma high school equivalency exam because they are not able to accommodate or afford its new computerized tests.

They’re worried that they don’t have the infrastructure to administer the new version that will rely heavily on technology rather than pen and paper. The states have the final say on which tests are used to determine high school equivalency, and most have been relying on the General Education Development Exam since it was first designed right after WWII.

At least two companies specializing in test design have lobbied more than 40 states to encourage them to drop the new GED in favor of an exam that isn’t so technology resource intensive.

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The ‘Opt Out’ Movement among parents seems to picks up steam in direct proportion to how enthusiastically President Barack Obama and his U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan embrace standardized testing. The most recent attempt to subvert the testing system was in Seattle, where over 600 high school students declined to take the standardized test exam in January, but opting out of testing is a hot-button issue today in New York City.

Even when students and their families can be persuaded to get on board, like in Texas, district administrators, teachers and education experts still raise concerns that too much required testing is tying the hands of teachers in the classroom. The clamor has become so loud and so widespread that anti-testing groups like FairTest are now arguing that whatever benefits are there to be derived from achievement testing are more than offset by the angst and cheating possibilities.

The opt-out movement is nascent but growing, propelled by parents, students and some educators using social media to swap tips on ways to spurn the tests. They argue that the exams cause stress for young children, narrow classroom curricula, and, in the worst scenarios, have led to cheating because of the stakes involved — teacher compensation and job security. Standardized testing is one of the most controversial aspects of the accountability movement that began in earnest in 2002 when President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act.

It’s easy to see why testing looked like such an ideal approach to assessment considering that the systems in place before were mostly subjective and made comparisons between students impossible. Introducing testing in high school and before allowed states to show exactly what being a high school graduate from their schools meant – that a person was prepared to take on college-level work.

Yet even as President Obama abandoned a large part of his predecessor’s agenda, when it came to assessment testing, he embraced it even more enthusiastically by introducing grant programs that encouraged schools to begin testing their students at a younger age.

The resulting pressure is distorting education, anti-testing activists say. They point to third-graders being coached on handling test anxiety, and 10-year-olds sent home for spring break with test prep materials. And they rail against the time devoted to bubble sheets, which can include weeks of practicing and several days of test-taking.

Noa Rosinplotz, a D.C. public school sixth-grader with a Facebook page dedicated to standardized testing, drew national attention with a firsthand critique of test-taking. She argued that school officials force her and other D.C. students to take a poorly designed test that includes questions that are either unanswerable or contain mistakes.

And of course these concerns completely leave aside the very real possibilities of cheating.

Critics say at the most extreme, the drive for high scores has led to cheating scandals like those alleged in the District, Philadelphia and Atlanta, where the former superintendent and 34 educators were indicted last month on criminal charges related to test tampering and changing student answer sheets to ensure correct answers. Teachers in 18 District classrooms at 11 schools cheated on such tests last year, according to a report Friday from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. The report found test-tampering that included providing students with answers, reading test questions aloud and encouraging students to reread specific questions.

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As much potential as Massive Online Open Courses might have to change the future, little of that potential can be unlocked until a way can be found to test the participants’ knowledge gains in a secure way. That’s where a company like ProctorU comes in with a way to proctor online exams to confirm the identity of the test-taker and ensure there’s no cheating. ProctorU brings that security to anywhere there’s a student with a computer taking a MOOC exam: in the kitchen, in the office, in the bedroom or even in a classroom.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that recent years have seen the growth of companies like ProctorU, right along with the growing popularity of online courses at the college and even high school level.

It works like this: Schools allow their students to enroll in a distance learning course where they move through the material at their own pace, but when it comes exam time, ProctorU is there to monitor via webcam as students take the exam to assure that no cheating takes place.

The old biases against online education have begun to erode, but companies that offer remote-proctoring services still face an uphill battle in persuading skeptics, many of whom believe that the duty of preserving academic integrity should not be entrusted to online watchers who are often thousands of miles from the test-takers. So ProctorU and other players have installed a battery of protocols aimed at making their systems as airtight as possible.

The result is a monitoring regime that can seem a bit Orwellian. Rather than one proctor sitting at the head of a physical classroom and roaming the aisles every once in a while, remote proctors peer into a student’s home, seize control of her computer, and stare at her face for the duration of a test, reading her body language for signs of impropriety.

Even those who do the job sometimes feel like they’re intruding too much into the students’ lives. That was certainly the experience of Rebekah Lovaas, who began her career in the sector proctoring exams for Kryterion, a company similar to ProctorU. She did that job for three years before being promoted to the post of operations analyst, and she admits she was never quite able to completely let go of the discomfort that comes from peeking into someone’s ultimate personal space.

Each online-proctoring company has developed its own approach. Some monitor live feeds; others record students via Webcam and watch the recordings. Some require students to share a view of their computer monitor, and empower a proctor to override their cursor if necessary; others simply make students install software that makes it impossible to use Web browsers or chat programs while the exam is in progress.

The companies make bold claims about their effectiveness, arguing their services are not just equal to but better than in-person proctoring. “The level of supervision over the Web is much more intense,” said William Dorman, chief executive at Kryterion. “Frankly,” he said, “we can spot any cheating.”

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by Richard P. Phelps

You became familiar with Campbell’s Law when only a few days old and by age two had mastered it. As a parent, you would have witnessed your children discovering, learning, and employing Campbell’s Law even before they could form coherent sentences.
Campbell’s Law is obvious. It is a truism. It postulates that when sentient beings are aware of the fact that their behavior is being measured–and they may be judged by that measurement—they may try to manipulate the measurement. Infants may be more prone to cry if they know it will get them what they want. Job-seekers may magnify their successes and minimize their failures on their resumes. Lonely Hearts may post their most flattering photos on the computer-dating website instead of the least flattering.

Campbell’s Law applies whenever there is measurement, judgment, and awareness, which is pretty much all the time and in every aspect of our lives.

Despite its ubiquity and banality, US educators cite Campbell’s Law as a rationale for eliminating external standardized testing that is, after all, sometimes used, fairly or not, to judge their performance. Given that Campbell’s Law applies whenever an educational test is administered–particularly so when a test has consequences–and given that Campbell’s Law postulates that measurement will be “corrupted” (i.e., that sentient actors may try to game the system in their favor), we should not measure in situations where Campbell’s Law applies, they say.

Problem is, Campbell’s Law almost always applies. Those educational tests called “no-stakes” still harbor plenty of incentive for manipulation, particularly among educators with less-than-pure morals. Cheap or lazy education administrators might prefer to use the same test forms year after year to save money, while the tested students inform the not-yet-tested students about the content of the test. Personally ambitious education administrators might use the same test forms year after year purposely with little security so that student scores rise over time; those administrators can brag about the score increases as evidence of their managerial prowess.

Educators who cite Campbell’s Law as a rationale for eliminating external standardized testing may not tell you that Campbell’s Law applies equally well, if not even more forcibly, in school classrooms absent external standardized testing. Are teacher evaluations free of the vagaries of Campbell’s Law? Of course not. For example, grades are susceptible to inflation with ordinary teachers, as students get to know a teacher better and learn his idiosyncrasies and how to manipulate his opinion. That is, students can hike their grades for reasons unrelated to academic achievement by gaming a teacher’s personality or grading system.

There are a number of problems with teacher evaluations, according to numerous researchers. Teachers tend to consider “nearly everything” when assigning marks, including student class participation, perceived effort, progress over the period of the course, and comportment. All of which are available for exploitation by manipulative students willing to employ Campbell’s Law. Actual achievement in mastering the subject matter is just one among many factors. Indeed, many teachers express a clear preference for non-cognitive outcomes such as “group interaction, effort, and participation” as more important than test scores. It’s not so much what you know, it’s how you act. Being enthusiastic and group-oriented gets you into the audience for TV game shows and, apparently, also gets you better grades in school. And non-cognitive measures can easily be faked.

Teachers always “teach to” something. If they are not teaching a required curriculum matched to a standardized test, what are they teaching? …and why should we be so sure that it is better than the required curriculum? In the absence of common standards and tests, teachers still teach to something, but that something is arbitrary; it is whatever the teacher personally prefers. And, why should the taxpayers pay for that?

What teachers and schools do in the classroom absent any adherence to common standards is not necessarily any “broader” or “deeper” than what happens with common standards. Indeed, it is likely to be “narrower” as it is determined by nothing more than one individual’s personal preferences. Nor is it necessarily any better, more profound, or more beneficial to the students. It’s merely more arbitrary.

Cheating in regular classroom work has become epidemic. The overwhelming majority of students admit to cheating in polls. Teachers and schools are ill-equipped to monitor or detect most cheating. Meanwhile, the Internet makes cheating far easier than it used to be.
Testing opponents argue that teachers have an incentive to cheat on high-stakes tests and no incentive to cheat otherwise. Nonsense. Social promotion and grade inflation provide the contrary evidence. In surveys, the majority of teachers claim overwhelming pressure to give high grades to and promote undeserving students.

We will not eliminate the influence of Campbell’s Law by eliminating external high-stakes standardized testing. Campbell’s Law will still apply in the un-monitored, un-measured classrooms that anti-testing critics idolize. But, its effects will be hidden. The primary result of an elimination of external testing: the public will no longer have access to objective evaluations of their children’s education. Our only evaluation source will be educators themselves, who can tell us whatever they wish.

Richard P. Phelps is the author of Standardized Testing Primer (2007) and other books about testing and is the founder of the Nonpartisan Education Review. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

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After a section of an A-Level exam was leaked on a revision website, regulators are looking at ways to minimize the chances of confidential leaks happening in the future. One possibility would be to narrow the three-month window given to schools to administer the exam to their students.

More than 20,000 students were able to view a portion of the AS level Biology exam before taking it, writes Graeme Paton for The Daily Telegraph.

The current rules give schools three months to allow their students to complete practical experiments under exam conditions and then to turn over those results to be assessed and folded into the final A-level grades. The generous window is given on account of the fact that some schools don’t have adequate lab space to accommodate all the students who need to take the exam in a shorter time period.

But earlier this month it emerged that questions from this year’s Externally Marked Practical Assignment (EMPA) in biology – set by the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance exam board – had been leaked almost word-for-word onto the “Get Revising” website.

Pupils from a number of schools are understood to have come across the questions, which were based on the issue of surface area-to-volume ratios, while attempting to prepare for the test.

Leading figures from the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents top private schools, insisted that the test had been undermined by the security breach and called for the end of exams sat over such a long period.

Bernard Trafford, who heads up the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle, echoed those sentiments, saying that a more reasonable window must be put into place to minimize the chance of cheating and leaks. The true victims of such leaks, according to another grammar head Anna Wicking, are the hard-working students who now must overcome a steeper grading curve thanks to their cheating peers.

Still, the AQA is denying the leak, saying that the paper that was found on the internet did not explicitly refer to EMPA and therefore will not be appearing on the actual exams taken by students.

But it admitted that it was now reviewing the length of time afforded to schools to complete the assessment to avoid any repeat.

In a statement, the board said: “We don’t think that any student who saw the material before taking their EMPA would have had any particular advantage – because they wouldn’t be expecting that specific material to come up.
“So we can reassure students that the marking and awarding of the EMPA will carry on as normal.”

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School districts around the country are taking part in a limited pilot that seeks to replace their state’s version of standardized achievement exams with an online-only test to assess students fully by adapting questions based on their skill level.

Students at 700 Oakland County, Michigan schools are taking part in the exam program which will offer each test-taker tougher questions if they’re performing well and let up in the difficulty if the student is struggling. In total, more than 1 million students from around the country will be participating.

The goal, educators say, is to better define a student’s achievement level so instruction can be adjusted.

Michigan is working with about two dozen states to develop and pilot the test that will replace the Michigan Education Assessment Program (MEAP) by the 2014-15 school year.

The spring pilot will be conducted in grades three through 11 in English language arts/literacy and mathematics.

The test is not fully ready for implementation this year. The students in the pilot will simply be trying out the test-taking software this time around for ease of use and comprehension. The adaptive component won’t be made available to them quite yet nor will they be receiving any exam grades.

This round of testing is allowing the designers to gather data on the students and will allow them to tweak the exam prior to its official launch in 2014 and will be subsequently administered every spring.

Because the exam will be administered fully online, it will benefit educators by allowing them to receive the final grades a mere 48 hours after it’s been administered. This give schools a lot of information to work with as well as identify struggling students quickly giving educators an opportunity to address their difficulties.

If the pilot is successful, it is anticipated that the new exam will replace the Michigan Education Assessment Program test which the students currently take every fall but for which the results don’t come back until spring.

State educators are excited about the pilot opportunity.

“This will provide the state with invaluable information on technology readiness to support moving to (an) online, computer-adaptive assessment, as well as give many Michigan students and educators a direct experience with Smarter Balanced items,” said Vince Dean, director of the office of standards and assessments with the Michigan Department of Education.

Mary Beth Fitzpatrick, an assistant superintendent of assessments in Berkley School District, said she is excited by the chance to participate in the pilot.

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