Wilkes County schools have been completely cleared in a widespread cheating scandal revealed this week affecting the state’s 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT).

 

“I received a call from the Governor's office that very afternoon saying that our results were ‘Great, in fact,’” said Wilkes Superintendent Dr. Rosemary Caddell.

 

Georgia public school students in grades 1 through 8 are required to take the CRCT in English, reading, and math. Students in grades 3 through 8 also take exams in science and social studies. After suspicions were raised last year, the state board had the testing company scan all test takers’ answer documents to detect erasures and note which classrooms had wrong-to-right answer changes that were well above the state average.

 

This week, the Georgia Department of Education released official results from their investigation showing that test results from some 191 schools across Georgia show suspicious patterns of erasures and corrections in at least 25 percent of the schools’ classrooms. The schools suspected of cheating are largely in Atlanta, although there is one Richmond County school on the list.

 

At least two schools in Atlanta are suspected of cheating in nearly 90 percent of their classrooms. Results of the investigation show that Atlanta’s Gideons Elementary and Parks Middle schools had suspicious results from 88.4 percent of classes and 89.5 percent, respectively.

 

The investigation has shown that more than half of elementary and middle schools across Georgia had at least one classroom where the number of erasure marks were great enough to indicate cheating may have occurred, the analysis shows.