Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Woman Arrested For Stealing SAT Booklet

Weird test news:

WILTON — Police have arrested a 50-year-old Wilton woman in connection with the June theft of an SAT exam booklet from Wilton High School.

Laura Garbuz, of 45 Breeds Hill Place, was charged with third-degree larceny. She posted a $2,500 cash bond, and was issued a court date of Aug. 18.

According to police, the arrest stems from an incident on the morning of June 6. Police say Garbuz misrepresented herself as an exam proctor and was allowed to enter a Wilton High School classroom, where she allegedly swiped an SAT exam booklet.

A check-in person initially stopped Garbuz at the door, telling her she had to stay outside, but when that man went into the room on an unrelated issue — he later returned to find her gone — the woman went into the room and pulled off the proctor ruse, taking one of the exams from the room, police said.

The theft was discovered after the exam, when the numbered exam booklets were not collected in their proper sequential order.

Garbuz was arrested Monday in the area of Center Street and Ridgefield Road. She was later transported back to Wilton Police Headquarters, where she was processed, fingerprinted and photographed. 

In the Era of The Almighty Test, such a crime cannot be tolerated.

It's so good they caught this woman two months after the fact to emphasize the point that nothing - nothing! - is more important than test security.

Thoughts?

6 comments:

  1. Chris Christie's little Chris is just as important as test security. Mary Pat uses a micro tweezers to find it and tweek little Chris. Ooooh Yeah

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  2. Dunno, RBE. I think I'm alright with this one.

    The SAT has been around for 90 years. Though it is the creature of the College Board run by the devil's spawn, David Coleman, and though many colleges are abandoning it for admissions purposes the test still has some (small) credibility.

    Kids who screw around with the SAT--there was that scandal out in Great Neck in 2011, when several folks were using fake IDs to take the test on behalf of other high school students--get prosecuted. So why not some foolish woman who walks away with an SAT test?

    Our Common Core-based accountability tests have no validity for the purposes for which they are primarily used--to evaluate teachers. But a valid and reliable aptitude test used for the purpose it was created, assessing a student's own aptitude for college admissions purposes, might be worth securing.

    Not getting into the argument about whether the SAT is, indeed, valid for what the College Board claims it is....

    Here's a link to some of the questions used in the first SAT, in 1926:

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/where/1926.html

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  3. Can't have folks F'in with the sactity of the system our reptilian shapeshifter corporate overlords have set up for their- Oops our benefit,now can we?

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  4. If there is any more powerful statement for our lack of a sense of context and humor in education, the hyper-seriousness with which we treat testing, common core and not, I havent seen it.

    ITS A GODDAMNED TEST FOR 17-18 YEAR OLDS!! ITS NOT THE CODES TO THE NUCLEAR MISSILES! ITS ALL BS!! How many of us were sloppy and F'd up a bit on tests between the ages of 1 and 18? How many of us figured life out, academically and otherwise?

    All these tests are only helpful when taken with a big dose of context and humor. Nobody seems to have that anymore, even on our side of the education fault line. They aren't precision tools, they never will be or can be. They aren't scalpels. They are huge, dense, blunt blurry lenses that AT BEST give broad suggestions.

    All of it....school, tests, etc...we need to frigging relax with the seriousness with which we take the whole thing. Its sloppy, unscientific business this. Our end goal should be making learners susceptible to the enlightenment and science and knowledge and history. Thats messy work and it will always be that. Thats why ed school is like entirely bullshit. There is no code, no real "best practices" other than "you need to communicate with other human beings in diverse and creative ways." That was always the coolest part about teaching. Its a pure profession. Teaching and learning existed before the imposed structures of formal schools and definitely before the state intervened.

    Its all gone...all the joy of it. Even if the reform movement went away today, we would still have the gang of cripplingly-earnest ed people who suck the joy out of it as quickly as any corporate reformer.

    Education as a profession is best seen not through the lens of a university course of study, but more like a long apprenticeship, more along the lines of the guild or trade union system. If we took ed away from the universities, and put it where it should be, maybe we'd all be better union people too....more enlightened labor-minded folk.

    Its too confusing to too many people in education that they have "all these degrees" in education and don't have any social respect. Well truth is: a degree in education, undergrad or grad, is bullshit. Go to college for SOMETHING and then dedicate yourself to the long process of learning how to teach.

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  5. I'm w/ Anon 9:37 AM. It's not the nuclear code, it's a test, and not a particularly good one. There were multiple mistakes in the booklets this time around, so the idea that this woman's theft detracts from the legitimacy of the test, well, so do the mistakes College Board made in the booklets.

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