ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Preoccupation With Testing and Grades Fosters Cheating : Classroom instruction is corrupted when high scores are the key to success for students and schools. Even teachers are inclined to act dishonestly.

Nothing children learn about in school is more important than tests and grades. In “Insult to Intelligence,” Frank Smith, an eminent authority on learning and language, reported that graduate students react exactly the same way as second-grade students when directed to select and read a worthwhile book but told they will not be questioned, tested or graded afterward. Both groups object to reading any book without the expectation of the teacher’s subsequent questioning, testing and grading.

More serious consequences result because of the public’s and the school’s deep-rooted preoccupation with testing and grading, including widespread cheating--by students and educators alike. Several examples of academic dishonesty come immediately to mind.

During my employment as assistant professor of education at Cal State Northridge in 1969, I first became aware of how teachers cheated. I noticed my office mate, a tenured professor, duplicating lists of words to distribute to his graduate students, all of whom were teachers.

He said, “These are lists of the vocabulary words on the California Test of Basic Skills” (the achievement test administered throughout the state’s public schools at that time). “I give the lists to my students so they can increase their students’ test scores.”

Working as a full-time professor supervising student teachers at two other California state universities, I regularly observed the administration of state tests. I vividly recall watching teachers telegraph correct answers. When a student showed uncertainty about a particular answer, the teacher usually smiled when observing a correct response but grimaced when seeing an incorrect one. Students almost always changed their answers when receiving grimaces.

During the 1980s, when improved scores on the California Assessment Program (CLAS’ predecessor) provided additional state money to schools, administrative cheating occurred (although school officials insisted they did nothing illegal).

This practice, which began in the Capistrano Unified School District in 1983, spread quickly throughout Orange County schools. During that year, the district reported the enrollment of 1,471 11th-graders, but in 1984, it reported only 1,068 12th-graders. A district administrator told me when I inquired about this discrepancy that the 403-student difference resulted because the district had redefined senior status to eliminate as many low achievers as possible from taking the state test.

Effortlessly, the district thus significantly increased the average (mean) score of its 12th-graders--and received its unearned reward of tens of thousands of extra state dollars.

The current state test, the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS), requires teachers to try to teach test content and familiarize students with test procedures. Ironically, the more tests that schools administer, the more cheating occurs: Teachers spend more and more class time trying to help students memorize test content and teaching test-taking strategies, seemingly to no avail.

In 1993, for example, the average CLAS score in mathematics for fourth-, eighth- and 10th-graders in Orange County schools was 1, 2 or 3 on a 6-point scale. Test scorers concluded that about a third of Orange County students in these grades demonstrated little or no mathematical thinking and that about half the students scored in the bottom half in reading and writing.

Cheating has taken a different form at Brea Olinda High School, whose counselors are now under scrutiny by a state auditor for altering approximately 600 student transcripts last year.

To improve the grade-point averages (GPA) of graduating seniors, Brea Olinda counselors apparently changed low course grades, including F’s, to P’s (pass), changes that eliminated the grades from calculation of averages, thus raising GPAs and increasing the students’ chances of college acceptance. Counselors also purportedly credited students with course work they did not complete.

The fetish in schools of testing and grading will continue, even though it corrupts classroom instruction: Parents, teachers and school administrators believe that a school’s curriculum should be comprised of traditional subjects and of activities including teaching, testing and grading how well students acquire facts and skills. And admission criteria used by colleges and universities ensure the need for accumulating test data and maintaining grade records.

But schools that rank the importance of tests and grades highly must also cope with cheating, which will flourish in one form or another. And in those schools, second-graders and 12th-graders will continue to equate education with questioning, testing and grading--and boredom and drudgery.