Cheating in schools

Lisa Snell has written an important article on cheating.Here's a brief passage:

In the Winter 2004 issue of Education Next, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and Brian A. Jacob of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government explored the prevalence of cheating in public schools. Using data on test scores and student records from the Chicago public schools, Jacob and Levitt developed a statistical algorithm to identify classrooms where cheating was suspected. Their sample included all student test scores in grades 3–7 for the years 1993 to 2000. The final data set contained more than 40,000 “classroom years” of data and more than 700,000 “student year” observations. Jacob and Levitt’s analysis looked for unexpected fluctuations in students’ test scores and unusual patterns of answers for students within a classroom that might indicate skullduggery.

They found that on any given test the scores of students in 3 percent to 6 percent of classrooms are doctored by teachers or administrators. They also found some evidence of a correlation of cheating within schools, suggesting some centralized effort by a counselor, test coordinator, or principal

Read the whole piece.Reason