Exam-Testing Breaches Put Focus on Security

By Jessica L. Sandham

A string of recent breaches in test security highlights the ineffective measures built into state assessment systems and raises questions about future security problems, some testing experts say.

In the past three months alone, education officials in Arizona, Illinois, Ohio, and Rhode Island have had to contend with school employees and students who, either intentionally or unintentionally, broke test-taking protocol and jeopardized the validity of exam results.

"There's no testing program I know of that's immune to the problem," said Stephen P. Klein, a senior research scientist at the RAND Corp., a Santa Monica, Calif.-based research company. "We spend a lot of money on these tests, and it's like throwing money away because you can't ensure the validity...