Testing agency loses 18 NY students' AP US history essays

ASSOCIATED PRESS Last Updated: 2:52 PM, August 17, 2012 Posted: 11:57 AM, August 17, 2012 A national testing agency has apologized to 18 New York high school students after their US history essays on an advanced placement exam were lost. Newsday reports that Educational Testing Service administrators described the loss as an "isolated incident." ETS says it scores more than 50 million answer sheets from AP and other tests annually. Students at Center Moriches High School have been offered three options. They can retake the essay portion of the test, cancel results and get an $87 refund, or accept "projected" scores based on their multiple-choice answers. Some of the high school seniors say they won't have time to properly review for a new exam. ETS officials say the test answer packets arrived at their offices, but handlers could not find the essays.

Harvard Students Accused of Cheating on Final Exam Reflects 'Culture of Cheating,' Grad Says

By COLLEEN CURRY Aug. 31, 2012 Administrators at Harvard College have accused 125 students of cheating on a final exam last spring, an allegation that Harvard graduate and author Eric Kester said reflects a "culture of cheating" at the school. Officials at the prestigious university in Cambridge, Mass., said Thursday that they had found at least 125 students who they believe collaborated on a take-home final exam during the spring semester this year. "We take academic integrity very seriously because it goes to the heart of our educational mission," Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in a statement. "Academic dishonesty cannot and will not be tolerated at Harvard." As of now, the school noted, the cheating is simply an allegation that will continue to be investigated. An academic board pored over 250 final exams from the Introduction to Congress class taught by Professor Matthew B. Platt, according to the Harvard Crimson. Platt noticed similarities among 10 to 20 of the exams that were turned in, and alerted the Administrative Board, which then conducted an investigation, according to the report. The board then found similarities among 125 exams. The student newspaper described how prior to the deadline to turn in the exam, panicked students packed into the office of a teaching assistant, asking for help explaining the essay questions on the test. Platt reportedly canceled his own office hours before the due date, the Crimson noted. The school did not release the names of the accused students, although a student told ABC News that some of the individuals who took the class might have graduated in May. Kester, a 2008 Harvard graduate who wrote a memoir, "That Book About Harvard," about his own struggles with academic honesty and the high expectations of Harvard, said the cheating scandal didn't surprise him. "When I was a student there, I definitely noticed there was a culture of cheating there," Kester told ABC News today. "There's a lot of pressure internally and externally to succeed at Harvard and when kids who are not used to failing feel these things, it can really bend their ethics in ways I didn't expect to see." Kester said he struggled through a calculus class during his time at Harvard, and at one point was approached by a group of students who were planning to cheat. He wrestled with his own morals about whether to join them before deciding against it, he said. "It comes down to the responsibility of the students, they're adults, they know cheating is wrong, that's the bottom line," he said. "At the same time I'm slightly sympathetic to the students, because in our society and especially at Harvard, there are high expectations to become the next Mark Zuckerberg." Kester noted that many of the students who cheat at Harvard are smart enough to pass the classes on their own. "Most people who cheat at Harvard don't really need to, it's just sort of a way of making themselves feel safer of not failing," he said. Harvard's reputation as a place that graduates politicians, CEOs and entrepreneurs only adds to the pressure that students feel while studying at the school, Kester said. Many of the students have likely felt pressure their entire lives to gain admittance to the school, and cannot risk failing out of Harvard once they're accepted. "The fact that this story alone has become national story is evidence that Harvard is this lightning rod. Kids now are very aware, they've seen 'The Social Network,'" Kester said, referring to the movie about Zuckerberg's life. "Most of these kids have spent at least high school and maybe since they were 5 or 6 years old getting into this school, doing SAT tutoring since 10 years old and going to organic chemistry summer camp. When you take that into account, you get a clearer sense of why you might be afraid," he said. Kester and Harvard administrators agree that most students there do not cheat, but that academic integrity could be stressed more on campus."We must also not forget that the vast majority of our students complete all their assignments honestly, diligently, and in accordance with our regulations and practices," Smith, the dean, said. "Allegations of inappropriate collaboration or plagiarism in a single class should not be allowed to diminish the good work or reputation of our outstanding student body." The school said it will focus on spreading awareness of academic integrity this school year.

Incentives for Advanced Work Let Pupils and Teachers Cash In

By SAM DILLON


WORCESTER, Mass. — Joe Nystrom, who teaches math at a low-income high school here, used to think that only a tiny group of students — the “smart kids” — were capable of advanced coursework.

But two years ago, spurred by a national program that offered cash incentives and other support for students and teachers, Mr. Nystrom’s school, South High Community School, adopted a come one, come all policy for Advanced Placement courses. Today Mr. Nystrom teaches A.P. statistics to eight times as many students as he used to, and this year 70 percent of them scored high enough to qualify for college credit, compared with 50 percent before. One in four earned the top score possible, far outpacing their counterparts worldwide.

South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.

They were helped by the National Math and Science Initiative, a nonprofit network that provided laboratory equipment and special training for teachers and organized afternoon tutoring and Saturday sessions. It also paid $100 each to students who scored a 3 or above on the A.P. exam — and to their teachers, who can also earn additional rewards. Because 43 of his students passed the exam this year, far above his target, Mr. Nystrom will add a $7,300 check to his $72,000 salary.

Organizers of the initiative, who met with lawmakers and staff members at a Congressional briefing last month, said that over three years, the program led to nearly 38,000 A.P. exams being taken in math, science and English, many of them by black and Hispanic students. This year, 308 schools in six states are participating.

The initiative’s success is refueling a debate over whether cash bonuses can coax improved performance from teachers and students — a New York City incentive program was disbanded — and whether paying students for schoolwork diminishes their ability to feel intrinsic pleasure in achievement for its own sake.

Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist who won a MacArthur Foundation award last month for his research on educational incentives, said that cash alone did not consistently raise achievement, but that combining payments with tutoring, teacher training and other tactics could be promising.

Of the 1,853 teachers participating in the initiative last year, more than half earned bonuses of at least $2,000, said Gregg Fleisher, a director of the initiative. Brian Leonard, who teaches A.P. calculus and statistics at Lake Hamilton High School in Arkansas, earned the largest award, $12,500, because 65 of his students passed the exams.

Three years ago, Lake Hamilton High had nine A.P. math students, and their parents were all doctors, lawyers or other professionals, Mr. Leonard said.

“I had a boy last year who was your quintessential average rural student: always dressed in camo, his dad was a mechanic,” he said. “He signed up for A.P. statistics, I worked with him, and he came out passing the exam.”

The College Board, which administers the A.P. program, has endorsed the math and science initiative, which is based in Dallas and is financed largely by Exxon.

In a book published last year, “AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program,” some academics expressed concern that under a push by the College Board to broaden its reach, too many unprepared students were taking — and failing — A.P. classes.

But Philip Sadler, a Harvard lecturer who edited the book, said of the effort: “They’re doing the right things and have had substantial increases in the number of kids who pass some A.P. exam. So that’s all good news.”

South High Community, which sits on a hilltop in this gritty town west of Boston, acquired a violent reputation after a Hispanic student stabbed a black classmate to death in 1989. Eighty-five percent of its 1,220 students this year were poor enough to qualify for the federal lunch program. Like many schools, South had previously let students take A.P. classes only they if had passed certain prerequisite courses with high grades and obtained a teacher’s recommendation.

In 2009, the school began working with the math and science initiative, which requires that all barriers to A.P. enrollment be removed. “My initial instinct was that if we let everybody in, it was just going to dumb down the classes,” Mr. Nystrom recalled.

But the school began urging students during announcements to sign up for A.P. classes, making it clear in guidance sessions and in meetings with parents that they were not just for white or middle-class students.

Mr. Nystrom had his own recruitment program. He made tongue-in-cheek posters portraying the rap stars Lil Wayne and Flavor Flav, as well as the male heartthrobs in “Twilight,” endorsing A.P. statistics as the supposed keys to success in life.

Forty-six students enrolled in Mr. Nystrom’s class in 2009, up from 12 the year before, of whom six had earned qualifying scores of at least 3 out of 5. Of the 46 students, 22 earned qualifying scores on exams in May 2010.

Last fall, enrollment surged to 61 students. Forty-three of those passed the exam, and 15, or 25 percent, got the top score. Worldwide, 13 percent of the 143,000 people who took the statistics exam got 5’s this year.

Thirty-one low-income students from Mr. Nystrom’s class passed the exam, more than at any other high school in Massachusetts.

The teacher’s manic energy and persistence may be one reason for his success. In his first-period class the other day, Mr. Nystrom outlined the meaning of basic vocabulary words in statistics — sample, parameter, inference — and then went over nuances.

Using an overhead projector, he drew a contingency table relating the relative preferences of males and females for hip hop, country and indie rock music, then used the table to explain marginal distribution.

Some students struggled to understand the table, and he explained it again — until Ashley Tran, a 15-year-old sophomore, interrupted.

“Oh, I get it!” she exclaimed.

“My favorite sound!” Mr. Nystrom said. Kristopher Santana, 17, a senior whose mother is a customer service representative at a tool company, was among those who scored a 5 in May. He said the 18 hours of Saturday classes organized by the initiative, and Mr. Nystrom’s twice-weekly, after-school tutoring sessions, had been helpful.

And the $100 incentive?

“There’s something cool about the money,” Kristopher said. “It’s a great extra.”

Mr. Nystrom attributed his students’ success to the Saturday classes, the extra training he got and the collective effort by his colleagues to persuade students that hard work can bring success.

“I’d like to think the incentive payments had little impact,” he added. “But maybe way in the back of my mind, I know that if I just push a little harder and work every minute of every class, more students might pass the exam, and I might increase my monetary incentive.”


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 4, 2011



An article on Monday about a program that pays cash incentives for teachers and students in Advanced Placement classes misstated the number of students worldwide who took the A.P. Statistics test in May. It was 143,000 — not 18,000, which was the number of test-takers who earned a 5, the highest score. The article also misstated the percentage of students worldwide who scored a 5 on that test. It is about 13 percent, not 15 percent.

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

By Trip Gabriel
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image....

Many States Adopt National Standards for Their Schools

By Tamar Lewin
Less than two months after the nation’s governors and state school chiefs released their final recommendations for national education standards, 27 states have adopted them and about a dozen more are expected to do so in the next two weeks.
Their support has surprised many in education circles, given states’ long tradition of insisting on retaining local control over curriculum.

The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition. States that adopt the standards by Aug. 2 win points in the competition for a share of the $3.4 billion to be awarded in September.

“I’m ecstatic,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education. “This has been the third rail of education, and the fact that you’re now seeing half the nation decide that it’s the right thing to do is a game-changer.”

Even Massachusetts, which many regard as having the nation’s best education system — and where the proposed standards have been a subject of bitter debate — is expected to adopt the standards on Wednesday morning. New York signed up on Monday, joining Connecticut, New Jersey and other states that have adopted the standards, though the timetable for actual implementation is uncertain.

Some supporters of the standards, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, worry that the rush of states to sign up — what Ms. Weingarten calls the “Race to Adopt” — could backfire if states do not have the money to put the standards in effect.

“I’m already watching the ravages of the recession cutting the muscle out of efforts to implement standards,” she said. “If states adopt these thoughtful new standards and don’t implement them, teachers won’t know how to meet them, yet they will be the basis on which kids are judged.”...

The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?

Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not — which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.

There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child’s health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: “We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.”

Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.

On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They’re fairly explosive.

Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too....

New high school reform will standardize courses, graduation requirements

Frank Juliano, Staff WriterThe Pretense Is Gone. There Is A State Curriculum For High Schools.

Local educators for years have complained that preparing students to take standardized exams, including the Connecticut Academic Performance Test required for graduation meant "teaching to the test.'' That, some argued, took away local control of course material.

Now, the new Secondary School Reform Act sets uniform standards in basic science, math, English and history courses that all students will have to meet. The state Department of Education will design model courses in each area and "content exams'' that will measure how well students have learned the material.

"The goal is to have more uniformity,'' Thomas Murphy, the state education department spokesman said Wednesday. "If you take Algebra 1 in one district and I take it in another, the course should cover the same material with the same rigor.''

Murphy said that the push for the new standardization came from college administrators, who noted a disparity among high school graduates from different communities. Officials said that the measure was also prompted by a renewed bid by state educators to secure a portion of federal "Race to the Top'' funding.

Connecticut was shut out of the first round of the competitive grant awards earlier this spring. The Obama Administration measure is intended as a successor to the No Child Left Behind Act.

"There are also standardized requirements for graduation,'' Murphy said of the new bill, including an increase in the required credits to 25 from the present 21 1/2. To graduate high school in Connecticut students will also have to have credit in a world -- or foreign -- language, produce a "capstone'' project that demonstrates their interests and abilities, and pass the state exams in the required courses.

The requirements take effect with the Class of 2018, who will be entering freshmen in 2014. Those students are about to enter fifth grade, and the new law also provides more support in middle school, including early intervention for students who are failing courses or missing too many classes.

R. Michael Cummings Jr., the acting superintendent in Milford, said the new law also broadens the use of on-line courses and leaves up to local districts things like the start time, the length of the school day and the number of instructional periods. "We'll be looking at all of those things.''

When students across the state are taking the same final exams in each course, employers and college admissions officers will know that an A in one town is the same as an A in another. It will also standardize instruction in communities like Milford, Stratford and Fairfield, that have more than one high school, officials said.

"This will provide more authentic learning and consistent grading,'' said John Barile, principal of Joseph A. Foran High in Milford. "Right now an A in Mr. Smith's class might not be the same as in Mrs. Jones'.'' The new curricula and testing will continue the movement in education over recent years "away from memorization and regurgitation of facts, but on how to think,'' Barile said.

In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 21, 2010
One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average. But it’s not because they are all working harder.

The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.....

Four-Day School Weeks

By Kathleen Kingsbury Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008

The kids in Caldwell Parish will be ditching a lot of school this year. Every Monday, to be precise--and they're doing so with the principal's permission. Starting Aug. 11, this rural school system in northeastern Louisiana will hold classes only four days a week, following the lead of more than 100 school districts in 17 states. The reason? To save gas money.

As the price of diesel--which most school buses run on--topped $4.70 per gal. last spring, school officials across the country watched their transportation costs skyrocket as much as 40%. Maryland's Montgomery County is debating whether to shrink its school-bus routes. In California, where state law doesn't require school districts to provide transportation, some districts are planning to cancel bus service altogether. But perhaps the most radical solution is one that was employed during the last big gas crunch, in the 1970s: the four-day school week........

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1832864,00.html#ixzz0pz6zidUh

Texas OKs school textbook changes

By APRIL CASTRO
updated 9:27 p.m. ET, Fri., May 21, 2010

This is why one needs to use a variety of sources when corroborating history. This is evidence as to why the document based questions have a purpose in the AP exam.

AUSTIN, Texas - The Texas State Board of Education adopted a social studies and history curriculum Friday that amends or waters down the teaching of the civil rights movement, religious freedoms, America's relationship with the U.N. and hundreds of other items.

The new standards were adopted after a final showdown by two 9-5 votes along party lines, after Democrats' and moderate Republicans' efforts to delay a final vote failed.

The ideological debate over the guidelines, which drew intense scrutiny beyond Texas, will be used to determine what important political events and figures some 4.8 million students will learn about for the next decade......