Mira Costa teacher, administration work to improve testing security

By Kimi Danaei

Staff Writer

Costa’s administration is currently working to improve testing security after an incident during finals that led Costa history department co-chair Adam Geczi to question whether the proper amount of precautions are taken.

In past years, students with 504 plans took their finals in the Learning Center. However, due to the large number of students with 504 accommodations this year, the testing location was moved to the guidance counselors’ conference room. During first semester finals, a student walked into his class holding a test, Scantron sheet and phone, which built speculation as to whether these students were taking photos of tests or researching answers online, according to Geczi.

“It was so egregious; this kind of stuff is probably happening every day, but you generally don’t have any evidence of the things that are going wrong,” Geczi said. “The opportunity was there for anybody to cheat should they choose to do that, and that itself is a problem when it comes down to test security.”

Geczi and Costa Principal Dr. Ben Dale met to discuss placing students with 504 accommodation students with other teachers of the same department during their planning periods. However, this arrangement has complications because not all classes overlap with a corresponding teacher’s planning period, Geczi said.

“One of the ideas we had is to move the 504 testing in our department and then use it as a pilot for other departments later on if we could work something out,” Geczi said. “There are a lot of snags in doing that because we have second period and fourth period that nobody’s prepping in, so we wouldn’t be able to administer tests in those periods.”

Geczi decided to speak about the situation with his students because it was an evident problem that needed to be resolved, he said.

‘‘Lack of testing security is an exaggeration,” Dale said. “We had one test situation called into question, and worked to resolve it with the teacher that said the system for providing accommodations to 504 students needs to be better. With the increase in the number of 504 students needing accommodations, we should have a more formal system in place.”