In the wake of an investigation into cheating and flawed test monitoring during state exams in 1995, Maryland education officials said yesterday they will scrutinize student results more closely every year.
They have begun by examining the May 1996 test results, published last month, said Mark Moody, the state's assistant schools superintendent for results and planning.
He said no evidence has been found of violations of the type that marred the 1995 tests in alleged incidents at 14 schools.
In addition, state testing officials have increased training and re-examined test directions to better ensure the integrity of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program Tests, said Steven Ferrara, the state department of education's testing director.
The first investigation prompted protests after nearly two dozen teachers received reprimands and suspensions, and after the state lowered the scores at several schools, including some of Baltimore's top performers.
Some said MSPAP test directions for teachers and students were unclear; that students produced identical or near-identical answers because they completed parts of the test in small groups. Some suggested that duplicate phrases occur because students are taught to repeat the wording of test questions in their answers.
"There is nothing ambiguous here," Moody said yesterday, noting that out of about 6,000 classrooms tested, teachers from 14 were cited.
Offering details of the investigation for the first time, state test officials said they originally reviewed the books from 15 high-performing schools to search for clues to their success and pass on advice to others.
What Moody found instead "appalled, disillusioned and depressed me."
In one case, a 10-line essay answer was repeated in the booklets completed by students in one elementary school classroom, confirmed Kathleen Rosenberger, director of state report cards.
In a separate incident, students in a classroom all wrote a nearly identical seven-line essay in answer to a test question, she said.
To determine whether the problem was widespread, he said, testing officials recalled 20,000 booklets, and reviewed 4,500, before concluding that several teachers in six schools gave students answers to test questions in May 1995.
In addition to the six incidents of alleged cheating by teachers, the test examiners concluded that students wrote identical or similar words in eight cases.
The number who had duplicate answers ranged from two in a classroom to as many as 27 in a classroom, Rosenberger said.
The examiners concluded that teachers were lax in their monitoring of test takers in those eight cases.
Yesterday, state officials refused to show reporters the students' answers, saying the test items may be used again.
They also refused to identify the 14 schools or five school systems where incidents took place, but the identities of several have become public through investigations and interviews by The Sun.
Sources identified Baltimore as the system with the most cases -- 10 of the 14 school cases. Of these, five involved cheating and five involved lax monitoring. One case occurred in Baltimore County.
One monitoring case was at Baltimore's Cherry Hill Elementary School, where the state alleged that two students wrote similar answers, confirmed Principal Geraldine Hale-Smallwood.
City school officials reprimanded a third-grade teacher there for lax monitoring, and the state lowered the schools' scores.
"She did not cheat; I know that she would not do that," Hale-Smallwood said.
Hale-Smallwood said the punishment is excessive, and that she believes the students -- "two of our brightest" -- could have come up with similar answers because they worked in the same test group.
At Glenmount Elementary -- one of the city's consistent high scorers -- testing coordinator Annette Dodson called the situation "devastating."
"To this day I don't know how it could have happened," Dodson said. "We'd worked so hard for so long to do well on the tests, and we are professionals. No one ever came out to talk to the children and get their version of what happened."
A Glenmount third-grade teacher who asked that she not be identified said several students used "very similar wording" when asked to write a letter to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation as part of the test. "I didn't find this particularly surprising," the teacher said. "All of them [the students] had the same pretest activities with the same teachers. We'd had months of after-school training in taking the MSPAP. But we didn't teach to the test. I heard other schools did that, but we weren't allowed to."
Echoing a sentiment heard in many city schools last week, John George, who teaches in the city school system and has two children at Glenmount, said the state "just can't stand the idea that city students ever could do well on a test. If they do, they must be cheating."
Moody bristled at the suggestion, and chanted, "Never, never, never, never. I started down this road with the most honorable of intentions. We do not search out the improvers and punish them."
Pub Date: 1/24/97
