CRUM, W.Va. — The results of Crum Elementary School’s WESTEST 2 efforts for the 2012-13 school year have been invalidated following a state investigation into questionable erasure marks on some tests.
Wayne County Schools officials are working to move forward after completing their own investigation into the matter, which deals specifically with one section of the test completed by fifth-grade students, said Superintendent Lynn Hurt.
The school system was notified by the West Virginia Department of Education in January that Crum Elementary was being investigated after several of the test bubble forms showed a large number of erasure marks in instances when a wrong answer was changed to a correct answer, an indicator of cheating, which was discovered through a third-party vendor hired by the state to examine the tests.
Hurt would not say how many tests were called into question among the 30 students in fifth-grade last school year. The state department’s investigation uncovered enough evidence to invalidate the scores for the one section of the test in question, but it did not uncover enough evidence to definitively prove that cheating took place, Hurt said.
As a result, Crum Elementary’s designation as a Success School, the highest designation a school can achieve, was altered by the state department to show the school has no designation at all.
The WVDE website on Thursday listed Crum’s designation status as “No designation: Invalid testing practice…
