7. The most volatile current debate among American school administrators, teachers, parents, and students concerns “high-stakes” testing.
8. The federal government mandated high-stakes testing as part of the No Child Left Behind law, signed by President Bush in 2002.
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10. Schoolchildren, of course, have had incentive to cheat for as long as there have been tests. But high-stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added reason to cheat.
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12. But if a teacher really wanted to cheat-and make it worth her while-she might collect the students’ answer sheets, and in the hour or so before turning them in to be read by an electronic scanner, erase the wrong answers and fill in correct ones.
20. Did fifteen out of twenty-two students somehow manage to reel off the same six consecutive correct answers (the d-a-d-b-c-b string) all by themselves?