How is social media helping kids cheat on standardized tests?

It’s almost worth it to allow kids to cheat just to see the creative ways they go about doing it. The latest such incident comes from Maryland where two students tweeted some of the questions they found on their Common Core standardized tests, which are what schools and governments use to measure student achievement across the country. These students weren’t the first either. 

Revelations this week that American high school students were caught tweeting about questions on nationwide standardized tests have fueled fundamental concerns about the latest approach to measuring student achievement nationwide. In Maryland, two 10th grade students tweeted essay questions that they had encountered on their Common Core standardized tests this month. Another student in New Jersey tweeted about a test question. And there were three instances of students sharing test questions in Ohio. Since February, there have been at least 76 discoveries of students sharing test information on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, says Jesse Comart, a spokesman for Pearson, the testing company. It’s done in public forums, so students may not perceive it as cheating, he said, but it is: “It’s the equivalent of you standing on a street corner in New York and waving a test booklet around.”