[WS:] I hear that this is a wide spread phenomenon. Everyone does it: administrators, teachers, and students cum their parents.
I see is as an inevitable product of standardized testing, which is a blatant example of Taylorisation of education. It takes away control of educational process from skilled labor (teachers) and farms it out to semi-skilled workers directly supervised by business managers. While this model can produce test scores more "efficiently" than teachers do, it also creates incentives for cheating by teachers and administrators.
My wife who is a school teacher tells me that about one third of all instruction time (184 days) is devoted to testing of one sort of another. This means only administering tests, not preparing for them.
If any other industry used one third of its productive resources for measurements and reporting it would be used as a textbook example of wastefulness and inefficiency. But in education, this is equated with "efficiency," and for a very simple reason - it makes the control of the direct producers by business managers more efficient. Clearly,"efficiency" is a code word for "managerial power and control."
What baffles me is why people go with this bullshit. Schools are controlled locally, so it would be easy to pass ordinances that either ban using standardized testing altogether or render them totally useless as the means of control. For example, an ordinance that limits the number of test days to one per semester, and an ordinance that mandates the use of several different testing alternatives and allowing students to chose which form they want to take. Such ordinances would likely receive considerable support from the public and across the political spectrum.
Emasculating the testing-industrial complex and its "organic intellectuals" in the academia is the necessary condition for any meaningful educational reform in this country.
Wojtek