HISD has trained 600 people to be TAKS test monitors, to help prevent cheating during next week’s TAKS testing:
They’ll fan out across nearly 300 Houston Independent School District campuses in teams of at least two to look for problems, including teachers who hover over particular students as they take the test, answer booklets stored in unlocked filing cabinets or multiplication tables written on classroom chalkboards.
The goal, according to HISD Superintendent Abe Saavedra, is to prevent the kinds of cheating allegations that have prompted ongoing investigations at two dozen schools that posted statistically improbable gains on the state exam last year.
HISD will have two monitors per campus. I am assuming all students are not taking the test in one big room, so the two monitors at each school will have to go from room to room, looking for anything suspicious. In fact the story says, “Some students, for example, are allowed to take the test orally. Others must be tested in private rooms.” That’s going to be quite a feat for the monitors.
It’s better than nothing, but maybe next year HISD can have one monitor for each classroom.
UPDATE: A reader emails that a monitor in each classroom would require 13,000 monitors. I can understand that would be rather unwieldy. My point, though, is that if there was an effort at cheating going on, it wouldn’t be hard to wait til the monitor left the room, since two monitors per school would have to cover a lot of territory.
Of course, maybe just knowing there are monitors will help curb any cheating tendencies…
