There are many dimensions to "cheating" and many ways to measure its harm

On getting high school students to take the tests seriously:
 
Our local high school created a policy where a score of proficient or advanced on the STAR test would raise that student’s grade by one letter grade in the corresponding class. So, no penalty for doing poorly, but a significant carrot and reason to study for the test and make a serious effort. The end result seems to have been positive – students were happy, and scores went up. It made the STAR test into an opportunity for them, rather than just a pointless chore.

Interesting response.   I leave to others to decide if this in quotation ‘cheating’ is intended to mislead. I used the term to provoke this issue: What do we call a state or test policy, whereby tests are administered in ways that provide misleading, invalid results, not honest feedback to students, parents, schools, and the rest of us?  Invalid results do not measure what the test purports to measure; often they are created by the use of modifications. Modifications fundamentally alter the purpose of the test. For example, while a reading test is supposed to measure reading, not listening, the use of a reader alters that purpose.  While a timed test is supposed to measure how a student performs within a given time constraint, allowing extended time alters that purpose.  You get the idea. [Whether timing on tests should matter is an important question, but one I leave for another day. Here, I focus on how tests that are designed to be administered in specific ways—are not.]
 
When we change the way tests are given and get invalid results, what should we call that policy?   At the very least, it cheats everyone from knowing what students know and can do.  
 
Two other specifics.  In 2003, the ACT and SAT removed the asterisk and stopped flagging scores taken with extended time. Now, some students do take these tests with extra time, and no one knows it.  For the story behind this unfortunate policy, please see my 2003 “Disabling the SAT” at http://www.educationnext.org. And see Nightline’s follow-up coverage. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfGYrSudW6s.  Note however, that this TV story fails to point out the reason for the push to use extended time—that the asterisk or flag had been removed.
 
The Massachusetts issue I raised deals with the standard MCAS, not the Alt-MCAS. (Please see pages 7-23, and 25). The policy allows the ‘standard’ MCAS to be administered with modifications, called ‘non-standard accommodations.’  These may include a reader for the reading test and a calculator for portions of the MCAS that specify ‘no calculator’ use. The scores obtained from these tests are then counted along with those that were administered with no accommodations or with standard accommodations. So, do we now know if the student can read or if she can add or subtract? No.  Simply stated, invalid results do not provide honest feedback.
 
Whatever we choose to call these practices and policies, I believe they are damaging and cheat us all from knowing what students actually know and can do.
 
Clearly, my blog touched a nerve. Thank you for that! Maybe someone has a better term for this policy and practice.  The bottom line: we need honest test reporting.
 

Please consider the possibility that the real cheating going on here has not been discussed in these postings at all.
 
Our students are being cheated out of  rich personal futures because they are being denied access to a well rounded education by folks who push our educational system towards the narrow focus on testable learning.  Our children are being cheated out art, music, career ed., PE, recess, and other non-academic activities.  Our kids are being cheated out of their chance to fall in love with learning due to this perverse preoccupation with measurable outcomes and quantifiable data.
 
Oh yes, there is tremendous cheating going on in our public educational system, but the most egregious cheating is perpetrated by people who do not work in the classrooms with our kids.  Rather, it is the policy makers who deny our children access to a wholistic, child-centered, slow-paced, discovery-driven education that are really cheating our next generation.
 
Of course, these policy-making folks will have all kinds of justifications for depriving kids of the whole-child education they really need.  I wonder how many of our ‘top-level’ educational decision makers have ever spent a few years in the classroom with kids, let alone a couple of decades.  What really concerns me is the utter cluelessness exhibited  those who are under-educated about how children actually learn.  The mere fact that some folks actually care more about test scores than they care about whole-child education betrays a profound ignorance of children and their true needs.
 
Heaven forbid that we would put childrens’ real developmental needs ahead of their test scores.

A couple observations on Miriam’s scathing commentary and Eric’s explosive comment —
For Miriam: The word “cheating” implies intent to mislead, and I’m not sure some of the practices you cite rise to that level. Rather, it rises to the level of educational measurement malpractice, which for professionals should be just as damning a characterization. For extended time, ACT and SAT have put asterisks with explanations on their score reports for extended time administrations at least since the mid-90’s, and before then strictly prohibited extended time administrations (which in my opinion was poor policy). The Massachusetts policy to which you link, on page 25 of the link, shows that MA uses differing performance level labels for their alternate tests for Spec Educ students — those differing labels with their definitions help folks know that the achievement levels obtained is somehow different for mainstream MCAS tests vs MCAS-ALT tests. That is better educational measurement practice than CA’s practice of using the same label [i.e., “proficient”] to mean different things for CA’s CST, CMA, and CAPA versions of the statewide STAR program that measure distinctly differing levels of achievement. CA’s practice invites misinterpretations in the trenches. For CA, methinks Spec Educ STAR test administration practices rise to the level of “cheating” in some districts when they overuse/abuse the testing options available for Spec Educ kids, but misleading information at the state level is just poor educational measurement practice that rises to the level of malpractice when it is pointed out to state officials and policymakers and they do nothing to remedy the misleading information that is promulgated.
Eric’s comment raises a larger and much more troublesome issue — the unfortunate response to high stakes tests in terms of truly lousy “test prep” approaches to curriculum and instruction in our schools. If we had testing police and prosecutors in CA, indeed Eric is right that many widespread practices targeting material on the statewide STAR tests would violate the state law he quotes. What bothers me is blaming the test for these unfortunate teaching practices. The argument by anti-testing anti-accountability folks is essentially — get rid of tests since they “cause” ineptitude and malpractice in curriculum and instruction. That’s like — let’s get rid of interscholastic athletics because they “cause” coaches to require excess practice time and parents to do bad things to the kids who participate. A subtext for this conversation is to bash the maligned multiple-choice test question format, and claim that other formats (open-ended, portfolio, whatever, which by the way result in more time and dollars devoted to the testing enterprise) will correct the problem. Balderdash — open ended testing formats are just as susceptible to bad test prep and test manipulation tacktics as multiple-choice item formats — witness Science Fair and Soap Box Derby events manipulated by overeager parents. I’m afraid that basic human frailities are the root cause for poor curriculum and instruction practices targeting what high stakes tests seek to measure — the fraility to look for shortcuts, the easy way out, attempting to boost test scores without doing the hard work of well rounded teaching efforts designed to address the full range of content expectations included in rigorous academic content standards. This human fraility is not unlike the fraility of greed as it affects our financial markets. When asked whether we should attempt to regulate greed in our financial markets, Warren Buffet said “No — I don’t think that’s possible” but we can expose it when it occurs and motivate individuals to take a higher moral ground in their decisions. I think we need a similar strategy to address the “cheating” phenomena that Eric so accurately describes.

Arguably, cheating is extremely widespread in California and brazenly practiced by the vast majority of schools and districts.  There is seemingly little enforcement of anti-cheating laws and guidelines.
 
One of the most pervasive forms of cheating in California is the widespread use of textbooks and instructional materials that deliberately contain tools that facilitate the narrowing of focus on those standards that are actually tested to the apparent exclusion of a broader base of knowledge, or what assessment geeks call the domain.  For anyone who has perused a modern California-approved textbook, this takes the form of built-in highlighting of those concepts that are tested, lists of “key,” “must-know” items at the end of each chapter, test questions at the end of the chapter that are designed to focus on and align with the types of items that appear on the California Standards Tests–and to the apparent exclusion of the larger domain.
 
Another pervasive and common form of cheating is the use of automated cheating software.  This software tests students relative to California’s specific content standards, and can even spit-out standard-by-standard information on a given student’s knowledge of a given standard, and then can spit-out instructional activities narrowly designed to bring the student up-to-speed on that narrow list of standards–again to the exclusion of the larger domain.
 
Is this “cheating,” or is it merely “standards-based instruction?”  The line, it seems, has been blurred.
 
Arguably, the types of widespread practices described above violate state law, which provides that districts/schools may not “not carry on any program of specific preparation of pupils for the statewide pupil assessment program or a particular test used therein.”
 
If it doesn’t violate state law, it certainly seems to violate what I was taught constitutes “cheating” when I studied education measurement as a graduate student some years ago.  The current “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” state that, “The integrity of test results should be maintained by eliminating practices designed to raise scores without improving performance on the construct or domain being tested.”   I believe these are currently undergoing a re-write and it will be interesting to see if the gurus who develop these standards will take on this issue.
 
This tacitly-sanctioned and widespread use of cheating strategies is perhaps one reason for the remarkably large increases in statewide California Standards Test scores while California students’ performance on other assessments that speak to the broader domain (e.g., NAEP) is relatively flat.
 
For all we know, much of the run-up we’ve seen in state API scores of late is due to narrowing of the curriculum, test-prep, and other cheating activities and we know little about broader achievement beyond California’s rather peculiar standards.