Erasure check

The cheating cases are built around excessive wrong-to-right erasures on the bubble answer sheets students fill in with pencils.

n average, students statewide erase about one time per answer sheet, state officials said.

But at some schools, answer sheets show lots of erasures changing wrong answers to right — in the more blatant cases, nearly two-thirds of the questions on an answer sheet.

“It’s kinda hard to think this is just a normal process that happens in a PSSA classroom,” Mr. Tomalis said.

Ms. Dumaresq said the range of misconduct is “everything from a few students who were — because of a proctor who was not attending well or maybe had too many children — allowed to copy off each other, to an adult who actually took an answer sheet and changed answers.”

Mr. Tomalis noted that the state got the original test booklets out of storage to check some changed math answers. In the test booklet would be a student’s scratch work — showing, for example, the student found that 5+5 = 11.

If the wrong answer was erased and changed to the right one without further scratch work, investigators viewed that as evidence of cheating.

Mr. Tomalis said most of the cases involve more than grade or year, putting the suspicion on employees beyond the individual classroom teacher.

In some cases of cheating, Mr. Tomalis said people in the schools admitted to doing the erasures, saw people in an office late at night erasing or noticed the next day that the answer sheets looked different than when the sheets were turned in.

“It’s imperative everyone speaks up when they see something like this,” Mr. Tomalis said.

In some school districts, the investigation has ended but the district remains under “continued monitoring.”

“The analysis tells us something happened. We’re not content to sit back and walk away,” Mr. Tomalis said.

This list includes Derry Area and Monessen City, both in Westmoreland County.

In Derry Area, the state identified one grade in the Grandview Intermediate School.

In a letter to Derry Area, the state Department of Education said the district’s investigation “identified multiple test administration violations, but no explanation for the cause of the high number of wrong-to-right erasures provided.”

The letter indicates the department has “great concern” over the violations and the lack of conclusions about how they occurred.

Derry superintendent David Welling said he didn’t want to provide details on the district’s internal investigation because it is still active. “From the district perspective, we have not reached full resolution on this matter,” Mr. Welling said.

In Monessen, the state identified at least one grade in the district’s elementary, middle and senior high schools as having a high number of students with a high number of wrong-to-right erasures.

The district’s investigation found no explanation, but the district issued letters of reprimand to test administrators who were identified by the state as having students with high erasure rates.

Linda Marcolini, who inherited the investigation when she took over as Monessen superintendent in January, said she conducted “a full-fledged investigation interviewing everyone,” but could find no evidence of cheating or any explanation for the high erasure rates.

But she said she discovered that Monessen teachers didn’t receive training in how to administer the test, so she initiated such training.

Ms. Marcolini said she has not been able to study the district’s preliminary PSSA data closely enough to determine if there was any drop in scores among the groups targeted by the state.

In both Derry Area and Monessen, any identified test administrator cannot give a statewide assessment to his or her own students or proctor any other students alone.