Race to the Top Education

[skysidhe]

It is important for the job I want. I had to jump over basic grammar ( which was out of date by years and years) and beg to get into the business communication class. If I had to write a memo, I didn't want to embarrass myself. With several assignment redos I managed to pull a B grade.

That said, with all of a A's and B's it is basically a technical certificate. I don't think it means as much as my son's A's in engineering. I fear though, that my grunt job will be much more plentiful a job to acquire, than a job with a specialized degree. I have my fingers crossed for the youth.

[Lamplighter]

If there's a buck to be made...
Here's a company that wants to catch cheaters on exams
using statistics...and their own "proprietary methods".

NY Times
By TRIP GABRIEL
Published: December 27, 2010
Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology

Mississippi had a problem born of the age of soaring student testing and digital technology.
High school students taking the state’s end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the answers.
<snip>
So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats:
it analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those
with so many of the same questions wrong or right
that the chances of random agreement are astronomically small.
Copying is the almost certain explanation.

When the anomalies are highly unlikely
— their random occurrence, for example is less than one in one million —
Caveon flags the tests for further investigation by school administrators.
<snip>

But there's at least one sane voice in the article

“You just don’t know the accuracy of the methods
and the extent they may yield false positives or false negatives,” said Dr. Haney,
who in the 1990s pushed the Educational Testing Service, the developer of the SAT,
to submit its own formulas for identifying cheats to an external review board.