In the United Kingdom, the Association of Teachers and Lectures has said that their members are being forced to change test results and actually rewrite the work for students. This is being done as a result of the increasing pressure to achieve high test scores. One-third of the members in this union reported that they felt their integrity was being compromised. Mary Bousted, who is the head of the union said that this is a culture that values test results. She also stated that children in this country are some of the most frequently tested students in the world. She states, “With the government’s persistent focus on tests, exam results and league tables, many teachers and lecturers also feel under enormous pressure- often at the detriment to high quality teaching, learning and development of their pupils.” This article discusses how this same issue is occurring in American education. In the last few months, many similar cheating scandals have came about. It seems that a test based education system that depends heavily on continuous assessment is always going to encounter these problems, especially when funding and pay then becomes linked to test results. Many teachers and administrators have began “teaching to the test, “ and from there it leads some educators to do the work for their students. In this article, it gives instances where teachers felt pressured to cheat. For example, one teacher at a primary school in England stated that she has been forced to change test results so that levels of progress would stay up.
After reading this article, I would first like to say wow, what has this world came to? It absolutely blows my mind that teachers are changing test results so that their schools can have high-performing students and avoid inspections. This is happening not only in the United Kingdom, but also here in our country, and probably many other countries. This is definitely a social problem. If students perform low on their tests and their teachers physically change their answers so they get a higher score, then how will these students ever receive the help they need to learn the material that they didn’t understand? Education in primary school is so important. We use the information we learn in primary school and build off of it to broaden our knowledge in upper grade levels. There should be no test that is so critical for teachers to even think about doing things such as this. Also, what is this teaching our students? Changing their test scores allows them to think that cheating is okay. It also enables them not to ask questions when they do not understand something, because when it shows up on the test and they get the answer wrong, their teacher will probably change it. There is absolutely no excuse for any teacher or lecturer to manipulate their students’ test results.
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