With school completely online for the foreseeable future, teachers have had to find effective ways to gauge student progress. These methods have ranged from open-note tests to strictly-monitored exams for which students are required to keep their entire workspace in view. However, in their efforts to limit cheating, many Advanced Placement (AP), honors, and accelerated class teachers have imposed increasingly stringent testing policies. Yet, many regular class teachers have seemingly relaxed their testing policies, making it easy for students to cheat undetected. We, The Union, believe that some distance learning testing policies are unfair to students.
There are dozens of ways to cheat during an online test: putting a cheat sheet behind the computer, writing on one’s arm, and even just searching online for answers. Teachers are aware of many of these methods, and many have taken steps to prevent them. Some require students to keep their phones in view while others ask students to show their entire workspace upon entering the Zoom meeting. Yet, one of the most prominent solutions has been shortening the allotted time for tests to reduce the amount of time students could potentially have to search for answers online. This solution works to an extent, but some teachers have taken it to extremes. In some cases, students are given less time than normal to answer the same amount of questions, making it more difficult to earn the same grade on a test administered during distance learning, compared to one administered during in-person school. Shortening test time is a perfectly valid solution to academic dishonesty, but teachers should make sure that the difficulty of the test does not increase dramatically as a result.
To make matters worse, some teachers fail to account for the difficulties students may encounter during distance learning. Problems ranging from internet connection issues to declining mental health may affect learning, and students’ grades, as a result, can suffer. Some teachers have curved their tests and offered additional tutoring to support students, but others are not doing the same and have increased the difficulty of their classes instead. Unfortunately, many of these teachers teach AP and accelerated classes, where the pressure to succeed is much higher than in regular classes. Teachers in advanced classes should offer additional help or apply either a curve or a minimum score to tests to support students through the learning difficulties caused by COVID-19, especially if they notice that their students are performing poorly compared to previous years.
On the other hand, it has been increasingly easy to cheat in regular classes. Teachers often post tests on Google Classroom and then allow their students to complete them over the course of the class period with little to no supervision. This practice has made cheating far too easy, as it is rarely, if ever, caught and therefore the cheater bears no consequences. Students are practically allowed to fall behind because there is no need to learn the material if one can just search for the answers online. This laxity widens an already large gap between regular and advanced classes, as students in regular classes trail further behind while students in advanced classes are pushed to master more material at a faster pace. This, in turn, would lead to issues once in-person learning resumes, as some teachers may need to pause their curriculum in order to catch students up after a semester of open-note tests that don’t properly reflect student progress. To solve this problem, teachers in regular classes need to write more difficult tests and put more policies in place to avoid cheating.
However, fixing these issues requires effort from both the teacher and the student. As difficult as it may be to learn under current conditions, students must do their best to adjust to distance learning. Teachers are often available for office hours on Wednesdays, and students can schedule appointments if necessary. With the new block schedule slowing down the pace of school, students have even greater opportunities to catch up and ask important questions before tests. Additionally, mental health resources such as the counseling office and a program called Counseling and Support Services for Youth (CASSY) can be accessed through the MHS website. Although distance learning has made education harder for many students, there are still a variety of ways students can stay on top of their schoolwork and make tests easier for themselves.
Testing during distance learning has caused difficulties for students at all levels. Students in advanced classes are held to unfairly high standards in an effort to prevent cheating, while students in regular classes are left in the dust. Teachers need to strike a balance, preserving test security without making tests harder than previous years. This could be done by communicating with students and coming up with a challenging but fair form of testing. Even though they are necessary to monitor academic progress, the tests given by different teachers highlight the growing disparity between advanced and regular classes, an issue that has always been present on campus.