herself. (With standardized tests, the teacher is typically not given an answer key.) If this is the case, then we have a pretty good clue as to why her students are in need of inflated grades in the first place: they have a bad teacher. Another indication of teacher cheating in classroom A is the classs overall performance. As sixth graders who were taking the test in the eighth month of the academic year, these students needed to achieve an average score of 6.8 to be considered up to national stan- dards. (Fifth graders taking the test in the eighth month of the year needed to score 5.8, seventh graders 7.8, and so on.) The students in classroom A averaged 5.8 on their sixth-grade tests, which is a full grade level below where they should be. So plainly these are poor stu- dents. A year earlier, however, these students did even worse, averag- ing just 4.1 on their fifth-grade tests. Instead of improving by one full point between fifth and sixth grade, as would be expected, they im- proved by 1.7 points, nearly two grades worth. But this miraculous improvement was short-lived. When these sixth-grade students reached seventh grade, they averaged 5.5-more than two grade lev- els below standard and even worse than they did in sixth grade. Con- sider the erratic year-to-year scores of three particular students from classroom A:     5TH GRADE SCORE 6TH GRADE SCORE 7TH GRADE SCORE   Student 3 3.0 6.5 5.1   Student 6 3.6 6.3 4.9   Student 14 3.8 7.1 5.6     The three-year scores from classroom B, meanwhile, are also poor but at least indicate an honest effort: 4.2, 5.1, and 6.0. So an entire roomful of children in classroom A suddenly got very smart one year and very dim the next, or more likely, their sixth-grade teacher worked some magic with a no. 2 pencil.