The president of American Institutes for Research, which develops Hawaii’s annual state test for students, emailed me back about our question regarding wrong-to-right “erasures” on the electronic assessment. Here’s what Jon Cohen said:

It is very common for students to change answers on online tests. I don’t remember the numbers, but we looked at it and it was tons of folks. Erasures on paper, on the other hand, are quite rare. When we do a paper erasure analysis we are mostly looking for teachers or schools cheating—classrooms or schools in which lots of students change answers from wrong to right. Most cheating on state tests is done after students leave the building, and adults at the schools change the answers (remember, the stakes are for the schools, not the kids). This is exactly what happened and made the news in Atlanta.

On an online test, adults cannot do that (or more precisely, we can tell when they do).

The next question is, have any Hawaii teachers ever felt the stakes were high enough to warrant tampering with their students’ tests?