The pursuit of higher graduation rates can lead to harmful outcomes

Rick Hess:

After being unexpectedly assigned to oversee my school’s online credit-recovery program in January, I soon discovered that my administrators were allowing six seniors to take their courses, including exams, entirely at home—unsupervised—so that they could graduate “on time.” When I said that I would not enable them to cheat by unlocking the students’ exams on the online platform, the students were promptly removed from my roster. When I saw how these students, and previous students who had done the courses at home, were acing exams in an impossibly small amount of time, in contrast to my on-campus students who usually failed the exams, I offered to proctor their exams on campus after school. When this was refused by my principal and my appeals up the chain of command were denied, I made a video showing how easily students could cheat (by Googling answers using actual students’ tests) to bring public attention to the problem.