Teachers Cheating To Raise Grades

Teachers Cheating To Raise Grades

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6918805.stm

Teachers are cheating to improve their pupils' exam grades,
finds a BBC investigation.

Teachers blame constant testing and the importance placed on
league tables for the pressure to improve results - which for
some teachers has led to cheating.

One unnamed teacher from Leeds said ready-made answers were
kept in a filing cabinet.

These were used by teachers to fill in missing gaps in pupils'
coursework without the students' knowledge.

Another teacher told the BBC how he pointed over pupils'
shoulders when they made mistakes in an exam.

'Widespread'

A survey by the Teacher Support Network, a teachers' welfare
charity, found the majority of respondents thought cheating
was commonplace in England.

Although a small, unscientific sample, of the 117 people who
responded more than two-thirds said they personally help students
"more than is appropriate" in order to improve exam results.

One respondent said: "I told a pupil what to write in coursework.
I think it is cheating and this kind of thing is widespread."

Another said: "I have colleagues who actually make the design
and technology practical coursework. Having complained, my head
assures me that this is OK because it raises school performance
figures."

Pressures

The A*-C grades, including English and maths, are used for
schools' league table rankings.

A teacher from Dorset told the BBC the pressure came directly
from senior teaching staff.

"I was told they had to get a C grade no matter what, which I
did, which was cheating."

He said he told his pupils exactly what to write, but to change
a few words to make it look like their own work.

He was so troubled by his school's attitude to deception that he
resigned over it.

Cheating by teachers is so extensive that Chris Woodhead, former
head of the education standards watchdog Ofsted, says the league
tables used by parents to differentiate between schools have
become unreliable.

"It makes a mockery of the league tables if one school is
behaving professionally and another school is offering the kind
of support where the teacher actually does the work for the
child."

Dennis Opposs, head of monitoring at the Qualifications and
Curriculum Authority, said the exam system was robust, but could
be threatened by rare occurrences of cheating.

Mr Opposs told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We have confidence
that in the great majority of cases teachers in this country
running the exams follow the rules.

"We know there are some who are tempted to cheat but we insist
that the rules are strict. The penalties for cheating, if you
are caught, are really very severe."

He stressed rules on coursework had already been tightened,
with proposals to replace it with "controlled assessment" for
GCSEs.

The Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, said that cheating "will not
be tolerated" but that it was "very, very rare" - and was
tightly monitored by international standards.

"A panel of independent experts headed by the education director
of the OECD concluded that no examination system is so tightly
or carefully managed as ours. We intend to keep it that way."

'Temptation to cheat'

From 2009, coursework in subjects like English, history and
business studies will be completed in the classroom, overseen
by teachers.

But Mr Woodhead does not think this will address the culture
of teachers cheating in schools.

"The new rules are likely to increase the temptation to cheat,
because other possibilities of cheating are removed, namely
parents doing work or the child downloading work from the
internet."

Although at the moment the statistics and league tables can
look good, the end result for pupils could well be detrimental,
as one teacher pointed out.

"We're supposed to be educating human beings and teaching them
how to be decent people. But we're teaching them how to cheat
the system, to do whatever it takes to win."


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