How to Cheat on a Standardized Exam: An Essay for Teachers

• In Event: Bad Teachers, Riotous Pedagogies: Possibilities and Consequences of Refusing the System

Abstract

Despite its title, this proposal does not offer instructions for cheating. Instead, I offer a conceptual critique of testing regimes within teacher preparation and certification programs. Within this current moment of a “teacher crisis,” cheating on standardized exams is a courageous and ethical act, one that challenges what counts as a “good” teacher and what kinds of pedagogical acts are viewed as desirable.
Cheating on standardized exams like the edTPA or Praxis reframes tactics of resistance. I join critiques that go beyond thinking of this moment as a matter of teacher shortage, seeing how material conditions, popular understandings of teacher roles, and forces standardization and privatization entangle to produce an understanding of crisis rooted in individual teachers (Au, 2022; Dover et al., 2016). I think with cheating as a form of fugitive learning (Patel, 2019) and radical study (Harney & Moten, 2013; Meyerhoff, 2019). This perspective suggests that cheating is a matter of truth telling that disrupts normative understandings of cheating or honesty (Foucault, 2020).
After years of struggle, my state recently removed the edTPA requirement and added additional flexibility for students taking the Praxis. While many of my students now find new pathways across the borders of certification, many others remain mired in a cycle of preparation and test taking. Dozens of current students have taken the Praxis more than three times, paying for test prep and exams only to postpone graduation. Moreover, they ask constantly about the possibility of new forms of standardization. The next edTPA or additional Praxis. They dread the racist systems at work in the making and doing of tests (Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016).
Cheating is not simply about creating additional pathways. It is an un/answering of crisis, an ethical refusal of the idea that privatized and standardized exams constitute “good” teachers. The act of cheating moves from demonstrating qualifications and codifying knowledge to thinking of teaching as a political act. Embracing “bad,” disruptive educational praxis contests the very conditions of this crisis.
Even as cheating on standardized exams seeks to disrupt racist systems, it is important to be aware of its consequences. When teachers engage in and respond to cheating, they face uneven consequences from racist, carceral systems (Royal et al., 2018). With this understanding, cheating is a matter of truth-telling that rejects teaching as joining the order of things. Cheaters embrace being bad teachers as part of building another world of public education, one bound by collective, rebellious care.
While this is a conceptual paper, and though any roadmap of cheating would expose tactics to governance and discipline, it is important to consider how and in what conditions cheating practices might emerge. Among other approaches, teachers might form radical study groups, think like tests, and study the rules of testing, considering specific subversive tactics and their consequences. Ultimately, cheating asks for a reimagining of teachers. This proposal shows that teachers are radical, agentive actors who do not accept reform or the given role of good teachers.

Author

• Jordan Corson, Stockton University