7 takeaways from Herald-Leader’s classroom cheating investigation

Key Takeaways: Cheating in Kentucky K-12 Public Schools

For nearly a decade, Herald-Leader education reporter Valarie Honeycutt Spears has been reviewing violations by students and teachers on state-mandated tests for K-12 public school students across Kentucky.

In 2023, she filed requests for data under the Kentucky Open Records Act. She received and analyzed copies of the testing violations for 2022 that revealed incidents of cheating described in letters from the state education commissioner at the time to superintendents. Honeycutt Spears obtained other testing violations through public records requests, and the pattern of violations continued in 2023 and 2024.

She found dozens of students and even some teachers cheated or were caught trying to cheat. Teachers gave answers to cheating students, failed to watch them closely enough or violated testing rules by giving them the wrong tests or falling asleep. Students used their cellphones, prohibited websites and hidden scraps of paper filled with test answers to cheat.

• Documented Cases Involving Both Students and Educators Incidents have included students using unauthorized materials and teachers or administrators directly helping students on standardized tests, revealing a range of misconduct from subtle rule-bending to clear violations.

• Notable Examples of Teacher Involvement State investigations have found multiple instances where educators orchestrated or enabled cheating.

• Test Score Invalidations and Official Actions The Kentucky Department of Education has invalidated test scores at certain schools due to confirmed cheating, emphasizing the seriousness of such offenses and their impact on the integrity of assessment processes.

• Consequences for Individuals and Schools Confirmed cheating has led to resignations, actions against professional certifications for educators, and long-term academic consequences for students.

• Persistent but Uncommon Problem While these incidents are rare relative to the size of the public school population, each has wide-ranging effects—undermining public trust and threatening the fairness of the educational system.

• Test Violations as a Whole Rose to 430 violations in 2024, up from 241 in 2014-15.

• Teachers and Students Engaged in Misconduct like plagiarism and rule violations.

An AI tool assisted with compiling and summarizing the takeaways in this story. It was then edited by Herald-Leader journalists.

This story was originally published July 22, 2025 at 3:12 PM.