Middle School Language Arts

Caveon Test Security Services contracts testing security services to schools . Caveon owes much of its business to the high stakes testing environment created by NCLB legislation. This is a company that uses sophisticated proprietary methods to detect cheating on tests. For example, a red flag might go up if certain patterns emerge, such as getting difficult questions correct while missing easier questions. For anyone wishing to stay abreast of the latest news on plagiarism and other cheating topics, Caveon provides a “resources” link to recent articles, both from Caveon staff and from external sources. It also has an excellent statistics page. Among the interesting things revealed in the various statistics: students who considered themselves “religious” were more likely to cheat than others (Maybe they were just honest enough to admit it.) and students who cheat in school are more than twice as likely to cheat in relationships. There are various statistics from both scientific and less-scientific sources and some do contradict one another. However, much of it is consistent, such as the fact that around 70% of students admitted that they cheat or have cheated in the past. Obviously, academic dishonesty is a pervasive problem at all levels of education, even at teaching and administrative levels where there is pressure for schools to show improvement in test scores. Certainly, adults bear a great deal of responsibility for how students view cheating, when they fail to be positive role-models. It is difficult to accurately measure how much worse things are now than in the past, but certainly it seems that technology has facilitated cheating. There are no perfect answers, but there is a lot of information on the internet that can help a teacher to: be aware of how and why students cheat, know what teaching methods can prevent or discourage cheating, as well as how to detect plagiarism. While it is a commercial site, http://caveon.com happens to be a rich resource for finding some of that information.