Would your HS student cheat on a test if no teacher was present?
A former Paulding County HS teacher complained remote online students cheated on their tests. In his complaint, he said the school rejected his offer to supervise their tests before or after school.
DALLAS, Ga. - In the wake of the pandemic, more metro high schools turned to remote learning to help students catch up on missing credits so they could graduate.
But a teacher and longtime critic of how school districts use online credit recovery classes discovered what he believes is proof of how easily those students can cheat on tests.
"You have a professional obligation to make sure that kids don't cheat," insisted Jeremy Noonan.
Noonan first went public with his concerns in 2016 when he taught in Douglas County. Last year, he got a job teaching science and math at Paulding County High. And as luck would have it, he was assigned to supervise in-person credit recovery for students who showed up in a computer lab to take online courses they had missed or failed.
Noonan told the FOX 5 I-Team when he looked over his class roster, he discovered 10 students from the previous year who took online classes completely at home. And he said he saw test results that made no sense.
Jeremy Noonan warned metro school districts of evidence he said shows how easily online students can cheat on tests.
"My first reaction was Lord not again," he said.
In a video he eventually emailed to several metro school districts, Noonan recounted examples of how some of those students finished tests in an incredibly short amount of time:
"The student completed this 33-question test in less than 18 minutes and scored a 97," Noonan's Vimeo video showed. "A sample of the first five questions shows how he could have taken this test so quickly. By pasting the questions into Google."
Will students cheat when no one's looking?
In the wake of the pandemic, more metro Atlanta high schools turned to remote learning to help students catch up on missing credits in order to graduate. But, one teacher and longtime critic of online credit recovery classes discovered what he believes is proof of how easily those students can cheat on tests. FOX 5 I-Team reporter Randy Travis examined the issue.
Noonan told the FOX 5 I-Team the quick amount of time it took those students to complete their online tests made no sense compared to how his in-class online students performed.
"Ten minutes for 30 questions," he said. "One minute for five questions. And they're making As on all of them. And when your own students are failing, they're supervised and they can't cheat and they consistently fail."
The online courses are created by a Texas-based company called Edmentum. No one from the company would respond to our repeated questions asking whether students could google their test questions and easily get the answers.
Jeremy Noonan taught science and math at Paulding County High School when he blew the whistle on what he saw as online test cheating. He now teaches at a private school in metro Atlanta (Noonan)
In a statement, a Paulding County school district spokesman said "online Credit Recovery courses (are) for a relatively small population of students. The school district must continuously work to stay ahead of the issue of academic dishonesty as it is present not just in the online environment but also in classrooms where the vastly larger number of students participate in in-person instruction. While cheating certainly happens, it is not epidemic in Paulding County schools, and it arguably is no worse today than it has ever been."
Noonan resigned from Paulding County and now teaches at a private school in metro Atlanta.
Paulding County did make one change since Noonan's complaint -- although the spokesman said it's unrelated. The schools now lock down all browser technology anytime a student takes an online test - also called an assessment -- in school. Those tests are also typically proctored, meaning a teacher like Noonan is present.
But what about blocking Google for testing at home where there is no proctor? All you need to get around that is a second computer.
Dr. Jennifer Darling-Aduana of Georgia State University is part of a research team that has spent years studying online credit recovery in school districts across the country.
"I never worked with a school system that didn't ultimately decide to proctor the test once they learned what was going on," she told the FOX 5 I-Team.
"The reason we want to get assessments is if students aren't learning the content, you want to be able to go back and reteach it to make sure they're mastering what they need to master to graduate."
These school districts tell the FOX 5 I-Team they don't allow remote online testing. Students have to come to school to be tested under supervision.
The FOX 5 I-Team surveyed metro school districts that use online credit recovery. Gwinnett, Cobb, Douglas, Cherokee and Marietta schools said they do not allow online students to take assessments outside of a regular classroom.
Like Paulding, DeKalb, Decatur and Atlanta schools do allow remote testing at home, but they say they have systems in place to catch cheaters.
Fulton and Clayton County schools chose not to answer our direct question.
"One of the benefits of the online credit recovery program is students can log on anytime, anywhere," said Dr. Darling-Aduana. "Which means they can be learning anytime. That sounds great. That also means unless a school's placed restrictions, they can be taking their assessments outside of the school day and so there might not even be a teacher around when they're taking the assessment."
Noonan agreed.
"You're putting those students in a tempting situation that's extremely difficult for them to resist."