When Educators Cheat

Pwede baja? A system will malfunction if one of its parts do something NOT aligned to the different processes which are geared towards specific outputs. What will happen to the teaching-learning processes when the educators lose their integrity? When the new performance-based evaluation was set by both the department and the Civil Service Commission, there were some raters and ratees who “calibrated” the results for their benefits.

There were even times when some educators instructed teachers and other personnel to alter the result of the National Achievement Test (NAT) so that their credibility will be “saved”. Their integrity was smeared to conceal a mistake; to hide a flaw; to fill-in a gap.

Integrity is a personality trait and comprises the personal inner sense of "wholeness" deriving from honesty and consistent uprightness of character. The etymology of the word relates it to the Latin adjective integer (whole, complete).

Seth Meyers (2015) says that the root of integrity is about doing the right thing even when it’s not acknowledged by others, or convenient for you. An individual with integrity is the antidote to self-interest.

But in the international scale, there are those teachers and school heads who manipulate the assessment results of their students. Some do this so that no further workload in remediation will be given to them. Others put up a face of being effective so they resort to manipulate the results of the learning outcome.

Education Week reports on various studies showing teachers who have cheated on standardized testing have a long-term negative effect on students, and new research from Stanford University economists looks at what happens to students whose scores were fabricated. One consequence is that some students were subsequently unable to take remediation classes or partake in other kinds of intervention that may have otherwise helped their academic performance. In the long run, they will not master the needed competencies.

But what is the deeper meaning why educators cheat?

Cheating on academic work involves a diverse array of psychological phenomena, including learning, development, and motivation. These phenomena form the core of the field of educational psychology. From the perspective of learning, cheating is a strategy that serves as a cognitive shortcut. Whereas effective learning often involves the use of complex self-regulatory and cognitive strategies, cheating precludes the need to use such strategies (Anderman, Murdock, 2007).

So, we can infer that since they want to have cognitive shortcuts, they need to have lesser “work” in the cognitive side. Does it mean they can be stressed thinking or their absorptive capacity of cognitive learning is less? Or, this could be a by-product of being NOT motivated to let the learners learn in the correct flow of the different processes. Is this the reason why there are supervisors and school principals who tag a teacher as LAZY?

One recent study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), looks at New York’s Regents Exams, the high-school tests in a handful of subjects that students are required to pass to graduate. Until 2010, teachers were responsible for grading their own students’ exams; they were also required to rescore any tests that fell just a few points below the proficiency threshold. These scoring policies, the economists found, enabled widespread manipulation: 40 percent of the scores near the cutoffs—or 6 percent of all the exams in core subjects—were inflated.

Alia Wong (2016) mentions that there’s good evidence that score manipulation does harm kids, particularly when teachers are falsifying their responses outright for the sake of avoiding sanctions.

So, another reason is self-preservation? An educator cheats so that s/he will not be reprimanded for the lack of efforts to perform the job assigned to him/her. But then, isn’t this the thing that workers do? A cook will make actions to better the taste of the food by adding salt or water before it will be served. The teacher could accept the result of the teaching process and consider remediation!

A cheating educator discounts the value not only his or her good name, character, and trustworthiness, but also the key element of education — learning. The teacher who cheats abandons faith in his or her ability to learn. Exam manipulation is a symptom of profound self-despair and loss of confidence.

So what must be done? There is a need to overhaul the system and revisit the value of INTEGRITY. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation must also be reflected deeper by the individuals so that the person inside could do GOOD to her ecology.